


Necropolis

by Fontainebleau



Category: Bas Lag - China Miéville, The Magnificent Seven (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vampire, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-30
Updated: 2018-11-15
Packaged: 2019-01-07 05:36:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 25,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12226821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fontainebleau/pseuds/Fontainebleau
Summary: For Mag7Week Day 8: 'Sunset'.In Vesontio, city of the dead, a liveman encounters a vampir ...





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The city in which this fic is set is based on China Mieville's city of High Cromlech, described briefly in _The Scar_.

Goodnight was racing the sun through the steep streets of Liveside. Down below, at the foot of the city, twilight had already crept over the huddled shelters where the poor and the poorer scratched out their existences; up above, the spires and battlements of the great houses still shone gold in the sunset, doves wheeling in to roost on the sunwarmed roofs, the orbs at the tops of the towers flashing. As he toiled his way up the cobbled street, not exactly hurrying – he was not a servant, to hurry – but purposefully, his steps led him from the beginning of night back to the end of the day. 

The stone walls around him still reflected the day’s heat; he was sweating as he followed the road upward, his militia-grey coat too heavy even at this hour, but the General liked to see him wear it, and in the still cold air of the audience chamber he’d be glad of its weight, as comforting as an arm around his shoulder. 

He shifted the bag he carried, heavy with the fruits of his journey, and at the sight of a familiar tavern the temptation to pause for a drink flitted through his mind – sitting with a mug of fragrant ale, greeting acquaintances and watching the tide of shadow rise upwards – but that must wait. Time meant little here, beyond the soft rhythm of sunrise and sunset, a day, a month, a year all one to a deadman who might survive for centuries. But courtesy was demanded, appearance must be satisfied; Goodnight’s patron would know of his return and would be expecting him.

Around him the market was closing, stallholders sweeping and rinsing around their tables, shops shuttering. It was quiet; the streets of Vesontio were always quiet. When he first arrived it was that calmness which struck him most strongly, the restraint even on the busiest market days; in Kadoh or Myrshock or the port cities he had seen the alleys and squares would be alive with clamour and activity, stallholders crying their wares, customers with baskets pausing to chatter, urchins running and shouting between the stalls. Not here. Here the costermonger stood silently behind his stall, nodding discreetly, friends murmured a greeting and passed by, children played soundless games under a table. Most here were born to it: though he had long made his peace with it, sealed his bargain without duress, he would never cease to find it strange.

When Goodnight first saw the man, leaning in the archway under one of the high-gabled houses, watchful eyes on the steep cobbled street, he thought him a liveman, quick like him: his clothes were dark and unremarkable, but sound and clean, and his olive skin caught the light of the fading sun, painted with a false ruddy tint. Not a man he’d seen before, and he knew most in Liveside; still, a newcomer was not unheard of – he’d been one himself, three years past. So he nodded to him as he approached, a brief impersonal acknowledgement, one liveman to another, and braced himself for the steady ascent to the General’s mansion. 

As he passed the man straightened up, took a step forward, an expression of curiosity on his face; his hand seemed to reach out towards him of its own volition. And closer to, Goodnight saw the blackness of his eyes, the slight waxen quality to his skin, and couldn’t help but recoil. _A vampir? So early in the streets?_

Usually it took till twilight, if not full dark, before they came, sidling and skittering along the shadowed alleys, skirting any pool of candlelight from a shuttered window: not many, not even on a moonless night, but one here and one there, sitting like a bundle of rags beneath the well’s lip, or waiting as a still shadow beside the doorway to a garden. Holding out a hand, breathy voices whispering: _Have pity. Just a moment of your time. Show kindness_. Beggars. 

Among the true dead they would not dare be so bold. The Thanati, austere and aristocratic lords, had neither patience nor pity for vampir: as parasites on their mortal servants they were an irritation, and as cousins in unlife an embarrassment. Thanati lords would have them swept from their path, send their guards to hound them back to their ill-built shelters clustered at the city’s foot. But Thanati, absorbed in their slow and deliberate schemes, were not given to wandering the city for amusement: many had not set foot beyond their own gate for decades. And so at nightfall the vampir would come, cautious and deferential, edging into Liveside to find what they desired.

Despite himself Goodnight stopped, curiosity piqued. This one must be newcome, to be so bold, and to have suffered so little. ‘You’re early to be out,’ he said brusquely. ‘Might be those less friendly than me would take you somewhere too bright.’ 

The man could not step closer, out of the shadow of the gate, but he stood straighter, the ghost of a smile on his lips. ‘Then lucky for me it was you that passed,’ he said. He gestured upwards to where the road led to the carved pillars of the Lune Gate. ‘And it’s worth seeing while there’s light.’ 

Newturned, then, not just newcome, thought Goodnight, to be still taking thought for the sunlit world. His features and accent made him an Southerner, perhaps from the Firewater Straits, but in Vesontio all such considerations became superficial, men and women of two kinds only, quick and dead. He eyed the vampir narrowly. ‘Not going to get what you’re looking for out here: no one would risk being seen.’ 

The man considered him, his eyes impenetrable dark. ‘Where would you recommend, then?’ 

Goodnight sighed inwardly, castigating himself. He shouldn’t have stopped, shouldn’t have spoken. _Showing interest: you know how it’s going to end_. ‘Follow me,’ he snapped, hating himself. At least at this hour any passer-by seeing them together need not jump to conclusions. 

‘Since you press me.’ He was surprised again to hear humour in that light voice, though a breath of eagerness underlay it. 

Goodnight shouldered past him, under the arch and into the courtyard: impossible here, far too public, with windows all around and balconies supporting lines of washing and jars of water. He looked around more closely and saw a grilled door standing ajar in one corner. ‘This way.’

As he crunched across the little court he heard no footstep behind him: shadows flickered and smoked and suddenly the man was ahead of him inside the doorway. ‘Be quick,’ he warned, pulling up his sleeve with a grimace; the man sank gracefully to his knees before him, eyes downcast. His hair was long, but not yet the tangled nest of neglect; it was drawn back low on his neck, his features sharp in the dim light.

Goodnight waited a moment, then another, unable to resist the petty power of it, until he thought he detected a tiny tremor as the vampir fought to control his thirst. Then he stretched out his arm and closed his eyes. ‘Come on, then.’ A cold hand took hold of his wrist more gently than he expected, and another stroked along the sensitive inside of his forearm: he shuddered as chill lips closed on his flesh and he felt the prick of teeth. 

_Why do we do it, we living? We needn’t fear them, don’t fall to their glamour; they’re not our betters or our rulers. But we do it, because they ask. Because they need what we have to give. We do it because we’re human._

The man drank with control, sparingly, eyes closed and face calm, not the panicked guzzling of the truly hungry, and to Goodnight’s surprise, before he need jerk his arm away with a growl of, ‘Enough,’ the vampire mastered himself to let go, with just one lingering lap of his tongue over the two red points on Goodnight’s wrist. 

He sat back on his heels, deliberately servile. ‘Thank you.’ 

His skin was already less waxen in appearance, his lips crimson; Goodnight ran an eye down the line of his throat as he knelt and felt an awkward stab of lust. He tugged down his sleeve again, embarrassed. ‘Dangerous tactics,’ he warned. 

‘Then as I said,’ replied the man, rising to his feet, ‘lucky it was you I met.’ He raised his face; they were of a height, and Goodnight found himself looking into those black eyes, disturbingly intimate. ‘I’m Roche.’ 

Goodnight didn’t want to know his name. He wanted to be done with this, to be on his way and make it a small event, easily forgotten. He picked up his bag again, and checked that the court was still empty. 

‘Your name?’ pressed the man, and Goodnight flung it back over his shoulder as he strode out to the gate.

\--

To walk through the city was to understand it, Vesontio’s strict hierarchy marked by dress, by manner, by title, but most of all, by place. Below, the slums, little more than shanties among refuse piles and sluggish trickling watercourses; above, the polished spires and granite towers reaching into the clean air. And between, a careful gradation: where the streets began their climb were the smallest houses and workshops, the rowdiest of the taverns; the markets, where rubbish accumulated in the gutter to be rinsed away, and dogs and flies might cohabit with humanity. Above these, larger houses in wider streets, courtyards with wells and hidden gardens where a daring tree might peer atop a wall, the shops of artificers and artisans. 

Through the great timeworn gate, and the houses turned in on themselves, the paved roads becoming broad and flat: here no gutters ran, and no wells stood, no living tree or flower, only stone and brick and dust. Here the quick made way for the dead, their liberation from bodily needs a source of pride to be flaunted. And higher still, the road wound up to the citadel itself, where great houses enclosed a dozen halls and towers within faceless walls, where the Thanati and their undead servants made their homes.

The dead were many here: the truedead lords, centuries old, passionless and powerful; their deadalive lieutenants, men and women elected to the honour of death and revivication, raising them to aristocratic rank; their mindless reanimate servants, obedient and slow. The city was theirs, its quiet dusty streets, its high stone towers and thick-walled mansions. 

The dead have many advantages – fortitude, centuries of knowledge, implacable, endless patience – but a few qualities they cannot have. Energy, agility, the restless inventiveness that is the hallmark of life: for these, only the quick will do. 

Not many living dwelt in Vesontio: few were born, and fewer found their way here, believing it a legend, or a nightmare tale. But here they were, in Liveside, servants all, high to low, sworn bondsmen and women, thaumaturges and artificers, errand-girls and labourers, their brief lives of rapid ticking pulse and fast, hot time like those of scurrying mice beside great armoured chelonas.

\--

No name, then, just a curt farewell as the liveman strode away. Roche stood for a while in the shadow of the court, still dizzy from the thick red richness, the taste of life on his lips. A year ago the act would have turned his stomach to imagine: now the quelling of the hunger that racked him was the only pleasure left to him. 

In this at least he was still true to himself: others of his new kind he had encountered in the huddling ghetto and found them restless, resentful, vengeful, venal, all the faults and fractiousness of life brought with them into unlife. But passion – anger, ambition, love – had never been his way; instead he had met the shocks of fortune with a stubborn acceptance, and though now it might seem a waste, not to have drunk deep from the cup of pleasure and indulgence while he might, perhaps it had served him better in the end. From the grind of poverty that drove him young from his home to the brutal labour on the iron road of the TRT, struggling to survive in a world of exploitation and betrayal, resignation had been the wiser course, the willingness to meet the lucky tumble of a die or the treacherous prick of a knife with the same calm fortitude. 

Even this last, the death so meaningless in its random horror, the creature descending on him too strong to fight, his life ebbing from him as he fought; the burning fever and strange awakening to new form and senses, the dawning awfulness of learning what he had become: a man of more feeling might have lost his reason, betrayed himself to the mercy of destruction. But Roche had always expected little, alive or dead; he took what came, moved forward, and this was where his road had led.

Had he hoped, or was hope only for the living? He had come here to learn what he was, to see how he might live, in the city where the dead ruled, where vampire might walk openly: had he though to find himself accepted? Respected? Some such hope must have sustained him on a journey so long, when the lessons of survival had been so hard-won. And what had he found? A city of the dead and the quick, side by side, the dead and their servants, but his kind? Pariahs; beggars; no, worse, parasites, as unwelcome as the rats and feral dogs that scoured the midden heaps. He had come to Vesontio to learn what he was, and that had been the hardest learning of all. 

And now this man, this liveman, with his hasty unexamined charity. He might not tell his name, but in this place, appearance spoke much. His clothes were militia-issue, coat and boots, worn with use but unmistakeable, and they had dallied long enough for Roche to see how he carried some of the soldier’s caution in stance and eye. Not old, but not young: few smiled or laughed aloud here, faces made deliberately calm or sombre, but this man bore a weight of sorrow on his brow, and a tinge of it had flickered on Roche’s tongue as he drank. A bondsman to a truedead lord, what else would he be? 

At the question, Roche roused himself, the fugue of feeding dissipated, mind clear and sharp without the fogging clutch of thirst. Through the court, now almost dark, and out the archway: he stood a moment, tongue flicking out to taste the air, and there, a scarf of trailing scent wound away up the hill. A woman passing by paused and then spat in his direction; he stared at her, expressionless. ‘Be off,’ she ordered, ‘or I’ll call the guard.’ And he whisked away up the dusky street, following the silver wisp of scent.

From street to street he climbed, over the neat cobbles of Liveside, shrinking from the shafts of lamplight that spilled from window or unbarred door; then through the high arch of the ancient gate, past the empty fane atop its steps and across the plaza, always moving upwards, into the broader avenues of the citadel. High walls with tiny barred windows, shadowed by battlements, rose up around him, but his benefactor’s scent led him on, past heavy iron-bound gates guarded by undead, soulless obedient things without a spark of anima which paid him no more attention as he passed than a bird or a rat. Higher still, the scent unwinding delicate before him, shot through with the tang of copper and burning candles, the tickle of old fabric and the breath of myrrh, until finally it brought him to a stop at the edge of a pool of pale lamplight. 

Two lanterns flared over a forbidding gate, and two guards stood motionless before it. ‘Whose house?’ he dared to asked, voice echoing in the empty street, but they would not or could not answer him. He faded back into the shadows, deeper dark on dark, and waited: what other occupation should he seek? 

For a long time there was only the drift of dust in the light breeze, and once the skitter of what might have been a rat; his predator’s instincts twitched, but he held himself still. Then a sound from inside – the creak of a hinge, the crunch of boots on gravel, a stifled laugh? A smaller door within the gate suddenly swung inward, and three figures stepped through, one after the other. The first was a deadman, tall and well-wrapped in a coat with dark embroidery on the sleeves, and the second his slave, pale and mute like the guards. The third was slighter, and quick, a livewoman: she bowed to the lord but did not accompany him as he departed, waiting instead, hat in hand in the lanternlight until he vanished along the upward street. Then she fastened her coat, clapped on the hat and took the road downwards, looking neither at the guards nor at the patch of darkness where he stood. 

Roche stepped, fast through the shadows, to emerge in front of her a little lower down. ‘Can you tell me,’ he asked, voice low and husky, ‘whose house this is?’ 

The woman paused to look him up and down, then said curtly, ‘Run away, bloodsucker.’ 

The guards at the gate behind them shuddered into motion and Roche retreated, hands spread in supplication, but asked again, casting his words louder to the dark, ‘Who lives here?’ 

The woman had started down the road again, but hesitated, curious despite herself at his question. She turned back to look at him. ‘Vauban,’ she said. ‘The General.’


	2. Chapter 2

High in the wall above the table a window was open to the fierce blue of the sky, and before it a birdcage of fine bronze wire hung from the ceiling; the bird within trilled sweet sharp notes as it fluttered from perch to perch. On the table, scattered over with maps and papers, a bowl of fruit had been pushed aside: it held grapes spilling over with trailing leaves, yellow peaches and figs ripe to bursting. But the feathers of the bird in its cage were shining copper flecked with brass, a clever artifice of sorcerous clockwork; the grapes were purple glass, their stems gold wire, the peaches carved from jade and the figs of painted porcelain. In the house of the dead, what need of nature’s art?

Notebook in hand, Goodnight was tracing the outline of a coast with a careful finger. ‘The port is silting up: in five years it will be unusable. The Samheeri are already looking to take the trade.’ 

Vauban leaned over to follow his plotting. In death as in life he was imposing, tall and severe; he had not aged since the day Goodnight first saw him. ‘The river?’

‘Navigable, if they dared. But they are superstitious …’ 

Vauban’s click of disdain was audible. Goodnight had met him wearing the uniform of a militia commander, had found in him the leader he and his comrades had lacked; in the chaos of slaughter and panic it had been an easy thing to swear his allegiance. Now, though he wore the embroidered robes of an undead lord, Vauban was his commanding officer still. 

‘Cold fires and empty bellies may make men braver.’ Vauban picked up the map and folded it precisely. ‘Is Scarabin stable as their ruler?’ 

Goodnight pulled over a bundle of inky flysheets and unfolded them. ‘You wouldn’t think it, from what’s said in the streets, Sack-gut they call him, but people don’t hunger for change. In time, though … they vote with their purses, to a man.’

Vauban moved to the other side of the table where a series of sketched plans lay overlapping one another. ‘What of the Cold Claw expedition?’ 

Goodnight liked less to talk of this, too close to his own experience. ‘Four parties gone, and none returned. They say no reward is great enough to recruit men to a fifth.’

Laughter was not a habit among the Thanati. ‘There is never a dearth of rash and ambitious men, wishing to make their mark. It will be done, in time.’

As Goodnight sifted the papers, tracing the lines that petered out in the waves of mountains, Vauban spoke again from behind him. ‘There is a further matter to discuss,’ he said. ‘The time of your death.’ 

Goodnight straightened up, his surprise unconcealed. ‘Sir?’ he asked; this was their agreement, and he had worked diligently to earn it, yet he had not expected it so soon.

Vauban fixed him with an unblinking gaze. ‘Your work is valuable and it is tempting to ask more of you than is due. But a bargain is a bargain, and I will not go back on it.’ Goodnight tested his emotions cautiously: he felt hollow, not as he had expected to feel at this moment. 

‘Your role will need to be filled before you are elevated. It will be soon, you have my word on it, but for the next while I will send you an apprentice to instruct.’ His fingers tapped restlessly, the closest he could come to humour. ‘To pass on what you wish to remain of you.’ 

Goodnight inclined his head. ‘I will be sure your affairs suffer no disruption.’

 

He gathered his papers and stowed them in his bag, made his salute and waited as Vauban’s silent guards opened the door at his sign. Descending the shallow stone steps, his head swirled at the prospect: his loyalty, his discretion, his patience, finally to be rewarded. Advancement, status, an honoured place in Vauban’s household, anyone in Liveside would be envious. But for him the promise was of something more: freedom from the talons of guilt, from the silent wings that pursued him into dream, the chance to lay down the burden he had borne for so long, stepping into an unlife untouched by grief or remorse.

At the foot of the stair he passed two of Vauban’s lieutenants, ascending for their turn at audience, and came out into the dimly-lit antechamber where men and women waited alone or together: a group of vivimancers gesturing as they argued quietly; two men from another house speaking with their hands, the guard standing silent at the door. He threaded his way towards the courtyard and the gate, past clouded mirrors in spidery gilt frames and a lone table bearing an ornate ivory chessboard, its half-played game dusty from neglect: time for him to set his business in order, to prepare for this apprentice, but first, perhaps, that long-awaited drink… His mind already busy with visions of maps and notebooks, a flagon of ale in a shaded courtyard, he was too little aware to prevent himself colliding with a man who stood aside in the shadows. 

‘My pardon,’ he offered quietly – no voice was ever raised in this house – but the man, dark-clad and with dark hair falling to obscure his face, turned away, hunched in on himself. Goodnight feared he might have harmed unwittingly; dead flesh might not sense pain but damage would not mend, and he laid a deferential hand on the stranger’s sleeve, murmuring, ‘I trust I have not hurt you.’ 

The man shook his head silently, eyes downcast, but peering closer Goodnight caught a glimpse of his features, felt the chill of his skin under his fingers, and recognition shocked through him. His intake of breath was audible, and the vampir met his gaze, his face wrung with warning. 

_He must be mad_. In the citadel, by day? By day the vampir huddled in their makeshift shelters, wrapping themselves against the narrow spears of sunlight which pierced through rotted planks or tattered canvas, hid themselves in restless slumber and wishful dreams of blood and hunt. Vampir did not walk by day, and of all places, here? Vauban was not known to be a forgiving man: if discovered, this one could expect nothing but to be turned out into the shadeless midday sun. _Walk away_ , reason urged him. This is none of your concern. And the vampir, Roche, as though hearing his thoughts, hissed low, ‘This need not concern you.’ 

It should not. All that lay between them was his brief grimacing charity, the marks still on his wrist; when the vampir had offered his name Goodnight had felt it unwelcome, a burden. But finding him here – need he ask, _why this house?_ – he could not avoid a sense of responsibility. 

They could not stand staring: to attract attention would be fatal. ‘Fortunate that we should meet so,’ he said, voice pitched low but clear, linking his arm in Roche’s. He cast an eye to the door, but that could not be the way. Instead he said pleasantly, ‘There are matters on which I would appreciate your advice,’ and led them through an open door at random. To his relief it gave into a broad corridor lit only by intermittent lamps; out of sight, he let go the vampir’s arm, embarrassment flaring at what he had done.

Roche looked challengingly at him, but before he could speak Goodnight hissed urgently, ‘Do you realise how dangerous it is for you here?’ He couldn’t comprehend the temerity of it. 

Roche looked at him as though he was a child. ‘Where else should I go, to learn this city?’ 

_A fool’s logic, or that of a man not yet lessoned in the ways of Vesontio_. ‘The Thanati deem vampir parasites. They’ll put you out in the sun and not stay to watch you suffer.’ 

Roche lifted his head, and Goodnight saw the pride he had wounded. ‘So you counsel me to be a beggar? Know my place?’ 

‘What do you think you can –‘ Goodnight began, but Roche raised a hand to still him, listening, and when he quieted Goodnight heard it too, the shuffle of approaching feet and low conversation. 

‘Go,’ muttered Roche, ‘you’re his man,’ but Goodnight cast one last glance towards the sound. 

‘No.’ He stood back, considering. Where to go? Roche could not leave, and wandering the mansion, halls and workrooms, storerooms and corridors, could only court further exposure. Then an idea took form: ‘I know a place no one will look to find you.’ 

\--

Rumour told that the mansions of the Thanati, imposing though they were with their great walls and high towers, were far greater below, quarried back into the living rock of the mountainside, worming it with tunnels leading to chambers packed with treasures and secrets. But rumour is prone to such flights of imagination, and reason might demur: what would an austere lich-lord need of treasures or luxuries? 

In truth the houses were far larger than their unliving inhabitants could need, and while there was excess behind the forbidding walls, it was the excess of abandonment: a library whose volumes stood years untouched, furred thick with dust and spiders’ webs, rooms of tarnished weapons, braziers blackened by long-dead fires, heavy gilt frames in a row along a wall whose pictures were layered so thick with darkened varnish that no figure or landscape could be discerned.

But perhaps rumour was wiser than she knew: the greatest treasures here were indeed far below: in the great stone cisterns, built to catch the rare summer downpours and hoard a wealth of sweet water for the lords of this arid landscape as they hoarded all else, in vast echoing chambers where reflections rippled slow on the stone arches overhead and water dripped, impossibly slow.

\--

Roche followed the grey-coated man unhesitatingly up a staircase, then another, coiling round and round in the dark. He saw as clearly as if in daylight the damp stone and crusted growths on the walls, but his rescuer slipped on the crumbling steps, cursing. The sudden closeness of blood-warmed skin and beating heart, the raw living scent of him, had left him struggling to master himself; even yet, the proximity strangled him and set a gnawing in his belly. Only when they paused at the top of the stair, the man hauling at a rusted handle, did Roche’s head clear: he could see the outline of the light on which it would open, and his hand settled grasping on the other’s back in a moment of wild mistrust. 

Up so high this could only be the roof, inimical to vampir; between the steep tiled turrets were broad flat expanses of roughly-paved stone, designed to collect and channel the summer rains. Shadows were few, under low walls, or the moving fingers of shade from the towers; for the most part the sunlight poured down unrestrained, bouncing from ground and wall to a dazzling brightness. Shoved outside and the door barred against him, he’d be a mass of cracked skin and weeping blisters within an hour, and dead in five. But his rescuer shrugged impatiently under his touch. ‘Still don’t trust me?’ 

The door gave suddenly, swinging open into a space dim and airy, with high windows all around, but shuttered against the sunlight. A belvedere, made for summer evenings’ feasting high above the city in the cool twilight, for sleeping away a hot afternoon with the caress of a breeze to flutter a lover’s hair against a cheek; though the crunching grit underfoot and the dust beneath Roche’s fingers spoke of disuse, of a place long slipped from memory.

He settled into the darkest corner, on a cracked and threadbare couch. ‘I still don’t know your name.’ 

‘I told you,’ said the man absently, swinging open one shutter and hitching himself onto the stone sill, legs stretched casually above a dizzying drop, ‘I’m Goodnight.’ 

And Roche remembered, what he’d heard as a dismissal. Goodnight? It seemed strange, but what was this man if not strange? 

Goodnight hauled up his bag, ferreted in it and drew out a flask. ‘I trust you. I must do, to be alone with you up here.’ He uncorked the flask and drank, head tilted so the sun picked out the reddish glints in his beard. 

‘I’m not an animal,’ said Roche stiffly. 

Goodnight favoured him with a charming smile. ‘Wine?’ He tossed the flask, his aim vague in the darkness; Roche snapped it from the air. 

He drank, for politeness’ sake, sitting still and silent while Goodnight reached into his bag again, pulled out a package and unwrapped it, producing a sandwich, absurdly mundane. The smell of it, beef with mustard between two thick slices of bread, was overpowering, dead and unappetising, and Roche shifted uneasily. 

‘Where’s your gratitude?’ asked Goodnight with wry amusement, and Roche remembered the taste of his blood on his tongue, rich and vital.

‘I am grateful. How would you prefer I show it?’ 

Goodnight shook his head as he chewed and swallowed. ‘I don’t need anything from you.’ 

The distance between them was helping Roche to steady himself. ‘But you would put me in your debt, twice over.’ His first gift, perhaps no more than a whim, but this, more willed … Why help me? he wanted to ask. 

Goodnight lifted a shoulder. ‘Perhaps I can afford to be generous.’ The easy condescension stung.

‘Who are you?’ he asked. ‘You’re his man, that’s clear; what do you do?’ Roche thought he knew; before, he had scented travel on him, dust and camels and woodsmoke, but better to hear it from his own lips.

‘I come and go, I travel, a man alone, harmless. I talk, I listen, I watch and I learn.’ There was a consciousness of status in his tone. ‘And I bring it back here. I am Vauban’s eyes and ears. We met elsewhere, long before here, but now, he does not leave. The Thanati never leave. That’s one of the ways they need us, the quick.’

Easy enough to understand: Vesontio was hardly a place for the chance traveller or wandering trader; few found their way here, and fewer left. But if the Thanati would lay their slow-flourishing plans, if they would learn of discovery or invention, if they would concern themselves with the affairs of the world, then some must needs make the journey to trade emporium or port city, must intercept the caravans that crossed the scablands, tapping the beating heart of rumour and hearsay and carrying it back to be sifted and considered, pieced and interpreted. 

_Elsewhere_ , though. ‘You made the choice, to serve him?’ 

Goodnight bared his teeth in a smile that was not. ‘He is the General. He is my commander; I swore, on a battlefield years ago, not to death, but beyond death. In that place’ – despite the sunlight, his face was cold – ‘only a dead man could have led us through it.’ He seemed to see Roche’s face even in the gloom. ‘I was his soldier and I became his bondsman.’

Roche spun the flask back across the floorboards. ‘So you were a newcomer once too.’ 

‘A longer journey for you than for me, I judge.’ Goodnight’s tone made the comment carefully impersonal, and the delicacy of the inquiry drew an answer from him. 

‘I followed the tales, of a place where vampir need not hide, where our kind was acknowledged, accepted …’ The tales had been true, he could not claim otherwise. 

Goodnight said hesitantly, ‘You seem …’ 

‘What do I seem?’ Roche found it hard to look at him, outlined in the embrasure against the noonday sky; an afterimage sparkled white on black behind his eyelids. 

‘Lively. Curious.’ Goodnight’s eyes roamed the dark, unseeing. ‘Bold. It cannot have been long since you were mortal.’ 

Roche felt the touch of his inquisitiveness once more, but this time resisted it, knowing he must bargain with the little that he had. To deflect the conversation, he asked instead, ‘Your service, your time here: what reward does it bring you?’ A soldier’s loyalty he could understand, but to venture out among caravans and markets bursting with life and colour and opportunity, only to turn back to this hushed backwater? To resist such temptations, there must be something more. ‘What did he offer you?’ 

Goodnight leaned his head against the stone. ‘The things I saw, the things I did …’ His words tailed off, and Roche remembered the haunting savour of old sorrows on his tongue. ‘He offered me what I wanted.’ The smile seemed genuine this time. ‘Peace of mind.’ 

‘It will be soon,’ he said. ‘I’m to have an apprentice,’ he said, ‘to train, to fill my place,’ and then, turning his head to look out over the city, so a liveman would have strained to hear him, ‘then I’ll die, and Vauban will see me raised to unlife. I’ll be a deadman, in his household.’

The words struck like a blow to the chest. Roche’s change had taken from him all he had, but in return had gifted him a predator’s skills: he could move more quickly than a living eye could follow, could ghost through the shadows to reach his victim in a breath. And he did so now, making himself invisible in the darkened space, the man outlined before him against the brightness of the sky. His footfall was silent, his movement no more than a passing breeze, and before Goodnight could turn his head Roche was across the room and the door closed behind him. Gliding noiselessly down the stairs, he heard only the faintest echo as Goodnight spoke his name to the empty air.

\--

Alone, Roche wandered the corridors, senses strained for any sound or movement. Why had he taken so great a risk? This house held nothing for him: no human prey, no cousinship in undeath: what should he have expected? The sole spark of life he had found, the twinkle of humour in a friendly eye, sunlight glinting red in a beard, even that was eager to be snuffed out and become one with this desiccated household. 

_Life_. Roche could not say that he had loved life, his moments of pleasure too few and fleeting, visions of luxury and leisure always far beyond his grasp, but now in his undeath he craved its touch, its scent, its heat and raw energy; he worshipped it, and walking the stone corridors, among decaying treasures and forgotten wealth, he found nothing of comparable value. 

And Goodnight – bondsman, soldier, almost-friend – would choose this unlife. Roche could appreciate the lure that bound him in loyalty, the cold logic of his bargain: self-recrimination and guilt, phenomena of the living soul, cast off, the haunted mind freed from its burden. But it sat ill in his heart; how could it not? He had been given no choice, the creature overpowering him between one stumbling exhausted step and the next, and when he woke, all he knew had been taken from him: the simplest human contact, the elemental pleasure of forest or meadow, the light of day itself; the taste of food and drink on his tongue, the touch of love … None had asked him whether he chose to renounce the joys of life, to renounce life itself; for another to have that choice set before him, so achingly unjust.

Goodnight might still go striding out into the noonday sun, might sit in the courtyard of a tavern with vines winding delicately overhead, might take meat and ale and look for a man or woman for an afternoon’s play. And he? He must walk the silent halls, unseen, unwelcome, hostage to the passing hour, waiting out the bright day until darkness came again.

\--

Goodnight’s residence spoke him a man of some consequence in Liveside. The street on which he lived was unfrequented, tucked behind the busy shops and colonnades; at its upper end stood a fountain, long empty, and above it a worn carving of an ancient river god. His rooms were above a bookdealers’ shop, a trade eminently respectable in its restrained and inorganic nature; from his window he could look down on the terracotta roofs below, and above see the doves wheeling around the belltower of the fane.

He was sitting at his table sorting his notebooks, separating sketches and maps, and from considering the advice he must hand on, had passed to reminiscence, of journeys and of other cities, of chance acquaintances and companions, all past or soon to be past. _A time of letting go_. 

The knock from below startled him to awareness, and set down the book he held and descended, thinking to find his new pupil, a young man stammering and nervous, perhaps, or full of confidence, brash and overeager. What he encountered was neither: at his door stood a deadman, one of Vauban’s lieutenants attended by his servants, and a young livewoman in a flowing black coat. A singular honour, for Vauban to send one of his household in so open a display of courtesy. Goodnight bowed formally. ‘Deadman LeMarc.’

Goodnight had met him among the quick. Clever and farsighted, as a liveman LeMarc had risen rapidly in his master’s service; Goodnight remembered him energetic and argumentative, full of courage and curses, but with a ringing laugh. Physically he remained the same, still broad and muscular, hair still fair and cropped, but now his face was smooth with a calm detachment, his restless energy drained away to leave a regal patience. 

He and LeMarc had been friends, once. They had diced and drunk together in the taverns of Liveside, had passed evenings talking poetry and spinning tales. Before he put life behind him, LeMarc had come to Goodnight to say farewell, bringing him his flowering tree in a pot and his last bottle of fiery spirits, and had embraced him like a brother. Now, though he bowed in courteous acknowledgement, the gulf between them yawned wide as the grave. Liveman LeMarc had been a servant like him: Deadman LeMarc was gentry. Goodnight looked at him and wondered, might they be friends once more, on the other side? 

LeMarc’s voice rasped like ashes. ‘The General presents you your apprentice.’ The young woman stepped smartly forward. 

‘Livewife,’ he greeted her, and she doffed her hat to reveal curling red hair, and sank into an exaggerated bow. ‘Liveman Goodnight. I’m Lark.’

LeMarc surveyed them impassively. ‘General Vauban hopes that his confidence in Livewoman Lark will not be misplaced.’ 

Goodnight searched his face for expression, but found none; his eyes slid to Lark’s, exchanging a spark of humour. ‘We will both endeavour to honour his confidence.’ 

LeMarc gave the briefest of nods and gestured to his attendants; the two quick watched until they disappeared from sight. Then Goodnight returned his attention to his unexpected protégé. He saw a well-dressed woman with a lively face, full now of a rueful grace: she knew herself judged and met his appraisal challengingly. Not tall, and not very old, but strong and bold; something about her snapped with life. ‘Come in,’ he said, holding the door open politely, and she smiled wide at him, cheerful and open. 

‘So you’re to be elevated.’ Her bright gaze flicked around the room with frank curiosity, then came back to rest on him. 

‘It was my bargain,’ he said; she must know his tale. Was it imagination, or did her gaze linger a little on the twin points on his wrist? He resisted the temptation to tug at his sleeve. ‘And you seek advancement?’ 

‘I seek change, yes.’ Her accent told her cityborn and Goodnight smiled a little patronisingly. 

‘To see the world?’ Of course she would wish it. He could imagine her a child, leaving her fellows playing fivestones in the dust under the courtyard wall to climb the peak at noon and peer out across the plain to the ridges of the mountains where they rose, fell and rose again; perhaps once she had sat in a tavern unobtrusive, and listened to his own tales.

‘Why not?’ She flushed, defensive. ‘You think me naïve.’ 

_I think you young_ : he did not say it. Instead he asked, ‘Why seek Vauban’s service? You could leave, make your own way.’ Few liveborn did, but it was not unheard of. 

She shook her head. ‘My mother – she’s deadwife now, she pledged me … there was a debt to pay, and I was most useful, they decided.’ 

_What are we all but pawns of the dead?_ No wonder Roche struggled to understand it.

‘Well, perhaps everyone can gain by it.’ He tried to sound encouraging. ‘What tongues can you speak?’ 

Lark held herself a little straighter, pride showing. ‘My father was from Myrshock. I know Kettai and some Sunglari.’ 

That was unusual, and Goodnight began to divine the shape of it. ‘That will make things easier,’ he said ‘although a little Ragamoll would go furthest. We can work on that.’

He gestured to her to lay down hat and coat and join him at the table, and when she did, set to outlining the lesson he had planned, detailing his journeys and the contacts he had made, setting before her an image of what she might achieve. Of course she was too ambitious, determined to prove herself, her plans thoughtlessly grandiose, but as the afternoon waned he began to sense underneath that a core of intelligence and caution; he thought he could picture her in Vauban’s audience chamber, speaking authoritatively and wisely.

When the sun had begun to fall, Goodnight closed his notebook and said to her, ‘Enough: no one can expect to learn all in a day.’ 

‘I can come back tomorrow,’ she said, and he smiled again at her eagerness. 

‘At noon.’ He took her to the door and she made her ostentatious bow again and turned to leave, but then came back to stand in front of him, chin raised. 

‘You expected a man. I know you did.’ 

‘From custom,’ he said, surprised out of prevarication. ‘Travelling alone…’ 

‘Ah, but there’s more ways than one to catch a quail,’ she said cheerfully. ‘The unwilling slave, abandoned by the caravan; the sister seeking her soldier brother; the widow with a pledge to keep…’ Her eyes sparkled with merriment, green and bright, her cheeks dimpled, and Goodnight saw it, the same charm that led men to invite him to a game of cards, to share a bottle, to join their company. 

‘Consider me taught,’ he said, charmed a little himself. ‘My ways won’t all be yours, I daresay; but I’ll show you what I can, and next time I go, well, husband and wife may find out more than a man alone.’ 

He offered his arm to see her to the end of the street and she met him with another dancing look. ‘As my husband says.’ 

The shadows were stretching up the street by the time he watched her take the road upwards; she walked confident and cheerful, speaking greetings to those around, and he thought again, _this choice, it will work_. He was just about to turn his back when a figure beneath one of the arcades bowed to her as she passed, but instead of returning this courtesy, she recoiled, and said, loud enough for him to hear, ‘Be off, bloodsucker. I told you before.’ 

Goodnight tensed. The dark-clad figure walked on deliberately slowly, like a citizen strolling home at nightfall: it could be no other. Roche would not hurry, would not cringe though people stepped from his path and stayed to watch until he had passed. 

He had vanished so suddenly, and the reason not hard to understand; Goodnight could not say why his scorn and contempt should have touched him so. But seeing him now, he could not let him pass. Close though he was, he knew he could not hope to catch him, not if the vampir wished to avoid him; still, there was a way. 

‘Roche,’ he called, and the name stuck in his throat, but he swallowed his pride and called again, louder, ‘Roche.’

\--

Try though it might to ape the austere streets and houses of the citadel, Liveside must inevitably betray itself. Dry fountains and smooth unchannelled streets might hint at aristocratic restraint, but the fleshly needs and appetites of the quick could not be altogether hidden: here there were market gardens tucked away in courtyards like a guilty secret, fruit trees which inched their leaves above a wall to find the breeze; the drifting aroma of cabbage soup simmering spicy in its pot, and the pits and peels that must be flushed away in the gutter. Livesiders ate and drank, baked their bread and roasted fowls, brewed fragrant beer and poured away their slops, but secretively, with furtive shame, as though if no one commented on it, it need not be true. 

Not so below. Where Liveside ended, fringing the curve of the river, the stone houses giving way to wooden, and those to the tumbledown shacks of the vampir, here the needs of life spilled out and over: pens of goats and scratching chickens, stinking tanneries and steaming midden heaps, dogs and flapping crows, the inescapable clamour and mess of life. Poverty has few virtues, but she has never lacked honesty.

\--

The shout rang like a bell in the evening street, and faces turned; Roche had no need to look to tell who it was called his name. Goodnight had come out in his shirt-sleeves, hair tousled where he’d been raking through it; at Roche’s inquiring look he said more quietly, ‘Come and speak with me, if you will.’ 

A liveman making a courteous request of a vampir, inviting him into his home? Unprecedented: Roche saw the averted glances, stallholders suddenly busy with their sweeping and neighbours mindful of their errands, the young woman who had spoken to him staring: he saw Goodnight caught between shame and determination, and he refused to allow this to be other than a meeting of friends. 

‘Of course,’ he said gravely, ‘if you are at leisure now,’ and followed him up the street to his door. 

 

‘I – That is –‘ Once they were inside Goodnight seemed not to know to know why he’d summoned him. He had matches to hand to light the lamp, but made no move to do so, leaving them in the half-light. 

‘Your bookseller will be displeased,’ said Roche absently. He looked curiously around the room: the table was covered with papers and maps held in place by candlesticks and cups, but otherwise the books were ranged orderly in a cabinet, the mantel bare of ornament; two chairs with cushions stood before the hearth and an iron-bound chest in one corner. Through a half-open door he could see a clean bedroom: the whole place seemed neat and comfortable, yet somehow lifeless. 

‘No bird, to sing? No pet? No wife or child?’ he asked boldly, testing. 

‘I am often away,’ murmured Goodnight. ‘Will you …’ The word that faded on his lips was _drink_. ‘You think me weak, to seek death willingly,’ he said abruptly.

Roche looked at him in genuine astonishment, then burst into an unpractised laugh. ‘What possible significance can the opinion of a vampir hold for you?’ 

‘You are-‘ 

‘Not like the others?’ Roche’s smile had nothing of humour in it. ‘I am exactly like the others. I hunger, and I would hunt, but here I cannot, so I must beg.’ He moved restlessly around the room. ‘What do you want of me?’

Goodnight pulled forward one of the chairs. ‘Sit,’ he offered, and when Roche did, he poured two cups of water; he handed one to Roche and took the other seat, so they sat beside the cold hearth as though they were friends. 

‘You know my story.’ His tone was low, conciliatory. ‘Will you tell me yours?’ 

Roche recognised the wish behind the question, to share and seek common ground, but what could a man of rank understand of his existence? ‘Not long to tell. Where I grew up … I was poor, we were all poor, and then the railroad came. They built the tracks and brought the train and for a while there was money and trading and plenty. But soon enough the train moved on, and the men and money with it, so I went with them too.’ 

_A noble endeavour_. The recruiter’s enthusiasm had been boundless, _history in the making_ , and he’d wanted to believe it. 

‘So did my friends. We were comrades, brothers, and we set out thinking we were to change the world. So we laboured, and forgot our home, made towns and broke them, blasted and cut and filled and lost man after man, and in the end one day I stood above the rails and realised they were all gone, my brothers: I was the only one left.’ 

Was the memory, and the pain of it, still as sharp, or had it faded together with his life? 

‘So I struck out alone, before the iron road could swallow me too, into the grasslands, a sea of grass taller than a man. There were little villages of herders in among the stems, not very friendly. They warned me, they had stories, but who believes those?’ He held his voice steady, matter-of-fact. ‘A vampir took me, and now I am as you see. That was my life: I laboured, and I died.’ 

He raised his eyes from the past and Goodnight’s face swam back into focus; in his expression he saw something like understanding. They looked at each other in silence for some time, no sound from outside, until, ‘Will you drink?’ asked Goodnight, clearly this time, and the fire from the unlit hearth seemed to flare in his eyes. 

Goodnight pushed open the door to his bedroom without waiting to see if he would follow and sat on the side of the bed, pushing up his sleeve. Roche made to kneel before him, but Goodnight caught his arm. ‘No.’ 

Roche looked up in confusion, and Goodnight let go, indicating the space beside him. The light was all but gone; Goodnight held up his wrist and Roche took it, paused, his expression measuring, then bowed his head to feed. And Goodnight bowed his head too, and they sat side by side, as friends do, the darkness winding around their feet as soft and silent as a cat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Speak to me: fontainebleau22.tumblr.com


	3. Chapter 3

Sunset was their time. Roche must wait out the day, wrapping himself in dream, or sometimes sitting at his doorway to watch the shadow of the barred iron gate inch its way across the flagstones, holding in his inner eye the city he never saw: the arcades of Liveside busy with shops and stalls, the streets echoing softly to footfall and activity, the white doves flocking pale among the towers. He must let the sunlight dwindle and fade, until evening came and he could go slipping through the lengthening shadows, piecing together the hazy twilight and the almost-dark to make a road he could walk. 

And Goodnight? Goodnight worked and wrote, advised and tutored, yet always with an eye to the falling sun, and in the last of the day, those moments of quiet when the shops had closed and before the taverns had begun their night’s trade, when the streets were cool and dusty, he would take his path to meet his friend.

To be seen together – there was nothing forbidden in it, exactly, nothing untoward, even, though transaction between vampir and liveman was usually brief. But to be seen sitting side by side and sharing confidences, finding occasion to tease and to laugh: who would not look askance at that? So they must find out the cracks and flaws in the fabric of the city where their two kinds could meet unnoticed: the overgrown ruins beneath the Lune Gate where broken pillars and crumbling half-walls lay choked in ivy below the overhanging cliffs, or above, at the vertiginous edge of the citadel, where the sheer rock fell away and they could hide themselves among the battlements, leaning against the stone to let the day’s warmth seep into their bones, watching together as the sky turned from pale rose to the deepest violet and the first stars came out. 

Goodnight’s curiosity was openly worn – a qualification for his work, no doubt – and he asked Roche his questions simply, as an equal might: _Why did you come here? By what road? What is it that you seek?_ And piece by piece Roche gave himself away: a story here, a memory there, confessions murmured into darkness, drawn in by the thoughtful way Goodnight listened, to his smile of recognition and understanding. 

_Why did you come here?_ Roche leant his head back against the stone and stretched out his hands before him, the nails long and dark. ‘I heard the tales, of a place where vampir need not hide. Where I could be a man again, not a creature shunned and hunted.’

 _By what road?_ His wandering had taken him from grassland and forest to the margins of a broad shadeless scabland, a place where he would search in vain for shelter against the inexorably rising sun. In his desperation he had chanced upon a caravan of ox-carts and swaying camels: these men and women were cloth-merchants and slavers, dealers in spices and medicines, and Roche, his eyes too black and his skin too pale, unable to bear the smallest ray of sun, could not hope to pass among them. To join them he had been forced to make himself cargo, lying as deep among a load of tapestries and damasks as a worm in the heart of a fruit. 

It had cost him, not to hunt, to lie with the itch of hunger burning under his skin over days and weeks of travel, but the risk was too great. Once or twice only he slipped from his hiding-place in the dark of night, flitting past nervous eye-rolling oxen and hobbled camels to scour the land for prey; but it was a harsh bare place, and often dry rock and scrub was all he found. 

He learned much of the caravan, even so: the brother and sister whispering through the iron bars they clutched, painting hopeful pictures of a future where they might stay together; the cloth-merchant so jealous of his wife that he lay awake to watch over her as she slept, as though she might betray him even in dream; the apothecary’s servant twisting a slender wrist as he took his pleasure, spurred on by the stifled pleas and swallowed tears. Roche scented it all, despair and devotion, hatred and lust, resignation and possession, and learned again how much had been taken from him.

All unwitting they had brought him across the scablands and into the mountains, had let fall hints and whispers enough to set him on his right path, and he had rewarded them as he saw fit; one morning at first light they found the apothecary’s servant drained and stiff, the iron bars bent and two slaves fewer, though none saw the tiny glass bottle of nightshade dropped in the lap of the cloth-merchant’s wife, she made sure of that.

 _What is it that you seek?_ Roche struggled to explain himself, even as he wondered why. From so high they could look down on the soft shuttered lights of the city below, and the moonless dark beyond. ‘I never thought to become as I am. I did not ask it: I woke and found myself hungering. And that would be the easiest way – to prey, to hide in the dark and take, as that one took me, to feed, taking no more thought of those I drank than of deer or cattle. But what kind of creature would I be?’ 

Roche said much, but there were things he would not say, and one question he would not answer: _Where do you live?_ He felt his face twist and met Goodnight’s gaze, eyes hard. ‘Not below.’ 

_Not like that._ When he truly understood what he had found in Vesontio, Roche had sworn to himself, _not there. I will not share the life of these broken despairing creatures. I will not live as they._ Words only, but he made himself believe them. 

Still strong and resourceful, he had found a gate with a rusted grille in the back wall of a crumbling townhouse, and within its courtyard an abandoned cellar. Dangerous, to come and go, always dangerous, but Roche was quick and wary, and in its cool darkness he had made an approximation of a home: some forgotten dusty furniture, a niche in which to sleep, a clay lamp on a shelf, and a well from which he could draw silently in the night, fishing out the moon’s reflection in his pail. It was sufficient, just, the most slender thread of self-respect, to lift him one short step above the exhausted despair of his kind, and allow him to say, _I am of the city._

‘Better a beggar here, better the contempt and the pity of the quick, and be able to walk as a man, to converse, to be human. If this is my choice, I will take it.’

\--

Time ran slow for them, one day like the next, the hours slipping away until they could meet in the shadow, and it ran fast, ticking out the time until their ways must part. And Roche drank. Not every day nor every other – he was sparing, and often Goodnight’s wordless offer was refused – but he must feed, and though he practised restraint, yet the time would come when appetite forced him to bend his head to Goodnight’s wrist, outstretched in quiet invitation. Then lips would touch skin and the rich taste of him, vivid and heady with the fleeting smoky flavour of sorrow, would fill his senses

Why did he make this gift? Charity, he would say, that first time, an obscure obligation; but even then there was something more, some fleeting spark of heat. And tasting him, Roche learned, learned what Goodnight’s ready tongue would not say, his smile of friendship not admit – the old, the welling regret and despair that threatened to claim him, and the new, the swelling flame that he tried to stifle as he shivered into Roche’s icy touch. 

\--

For Goodnight this was a time for closing the door softly on the past, going calmly and easily towards his change, yet it was though he’d been unmoored, cut free in these last days to ghost through the city, in the night and under the paling dawn sky. He would work through the bright morning and hazy afternoon, making his notes, setting all in order for his successor, but when the sun fell to the west he saw dark eyes and heard a Firewater accent, and then he left his maps and books and went to find him waiting. 

The vampir showed him darkened streets lit only by the pale lamps of the Thanati mansions, where sharp flashes of actinic brightness burst under their feet from thaumaturgic workshops below; Goodnight learned the sound of the night wind as it swept the empty plaza, setting signs creaking and whistling faintly among the pillars of the colonnades; he saw the animals which hopped and scuffled among the ruins, long-legged jerboas and tiny foxes, and the swooping owls that seized them.

 _It will end soon_ , Goodnight told himself, _a diversion, nothing more_ ; it did not matter that he should yearn so to draw that tiny smile from him, that he liked to see him sprawl and relax on a threadbare chaise, emperor of a dusty library, and to watch him turn his face to the last warm light of the sun below the horizon, its rosy light touching his skin so that for a moment he seemed alive again. 

One afternoon he started awake over his papers, mouth dry and mind slow, to a patient knocking on his door. A glance at the sunlight on the floorboards showed it early afternoon; of course, Lark, he had asked her to come. Goodnight threw the door open, running a hand through his hair. ‘I must have …’ Waving her in with a gesture he turned his back in search of water. 

Lark stood watching him, eyes narrowed, and when he came back, cup in hand, said abruptly, ‘You weren’t born here.’ 

He struggled to parse the comment, tendrils of dream still coiling gently in his mind. ‘Of course not. You know that.’ 

Instead of sitting down she stood facing him, hands clasped. ‘If you were, you would not … with the vampir.’ 

Goodnight remembered how she had spoken to Roche, and it cut still. ‘I may choose my friends where I will.’ 

‘Friends? Is that what he says you are?’

 _My apprentice, and she thinks to lesson me_. ‘Roche,’ said Goodnight carefully, ‘is my friend. And I need not answer to you for that.’ 

‘Then answer to yourself.’ She pointed to the mirror. ‘Look.’ 

He had no need to look: he was pale, no doubt of that, and sometimes if he stood quickly his head would reel. Her voice behind him was softer. ‘You are unwise, to offer so – it is unhealthy.’ 

Goodnight leaned on the mantel to avoid his reflection’s gaze. ‘It is what we all do. They must drink.’ 

‘Oh, charity.’ A flash of humour, no more. ‘One, now and again. But not to let him use you, to let him _in_.’ 

‘Enough,’ said Goodnight, pushing himself away from the mirror. ‘Are you here to learn or to tutor?’ 

She was still standing, defiant her cheeks flushed. ‘Perhaps there’s none will tutor you but me. Have you been below the river?’ 

The brusque question startled him into answer. ‘Of course not.’ _Who did?_

‘You should,’ she urged, ‘it would show you, a bloodsucker’s a bloodsucker, that’s all.’ She came closer, and now there was something urgent in her manner. ‘He’ll take from you, Goodnight, take and take until you’ve nothing more to give. You don’t know the stories. The woman who fell into a vampir’s thrall, who let her visit the house at night and lie beside her in her bed; the boy who went down below at night, for a dare …’ 

At such foolishness his sparking anger drained away. ‘Stories,’ he said derisively, ‘for a winter’s night’. 

‘Yes,’ said Lark, facing down his amusement, ‘night stories.’ 

She was so earnest, telling the tales that mothers told to frighten bold children to good behaviour, that in her overlarge coat she seemed no more than a child herself, and the warning the easier to dismiss. ‘You’ve spoken, and I’ve heard; I know it meant kindly, but this is not the matter we have to attend to.’

At the reminder her shoulders slumped and she nodded once, deferential again. He gestured to the table. ‘Find the maps, and the book: there is talk, above, that the General may intend to influence matters in Maru’ahm and your Ragamoll could stand improvement.’ 

As she arranged the papers he brewed tea in a tall brown pot and brought it with cups and a plate of bread and meat for himself, placing it a little self-consciously at his elbow, but she made no further glance or comment. 

Their afternoon’s work was peaceful, and their parting words amicable, but later, as Goodnight turned from his door and walked in the last light of the setting sun to the end of the street, he could not but feel observed, judged, and at the corner he paused a while. But after a little he smiled to himself and took the road upward after all.

He passed under the carved pedestal of the Gate and came out into the plaza; the pooling darkness between the pillars of the fane was impenetrable, and he would have continued unawares had Roche not detached himself from the very darkest place and settled into step with him. ‘Come,’ he said, and led the way, up and further up, to the very top and edge of the scarp where an ocean of velvet dark spread out below them until it met the starry sky. 

They lay propped on their elbows, the stone still faintly warm beneath them from its baking at midday, and after a while Roche asked, ‘Tell me how it was, when you were young.’ 

So Goodnight spun some tales of his childhood, embroidering them a little to hear him laugh, and as he did so, thought, _See? What harm in this?_ He made no offer of his wrist, and Roche no sign that he thought of it; they talked, were silent together for a while, playing idly with pebbles, then talked some more. 

Yet in his heart, the secret: where they lay Roche’s head was close by his; if Goodnight turned his cheek, so close … He ached to touch a hand to that slanting cheekbone, to run his fingers through the soft black hair, to press his mouth to the dip of his cold throat. He wanted, the thud of his pulse loud in the silence, and when he met Roche’s eye, he thought he saw the knowledge reflected there. 

\-- 

In Vesontio the vivimancers’ art is the most highly prized of all, their workshops the secret heart and engine of the citadel. For some who pass through their hands the process is an ending, brief and brutal: unwilling slaves brought struggling against their bonds, stifled with dispassionate expertise, minds snuffed out to leave only a body, obedient and strong, with no will but their masters’. The daily work of bio-thaumaturgy, the creation of the many who will labour and carry, attend and guard. 

But for others the change they offer is an elevation: not easy, nor wholly painless, but a crossing-over and a reawakening. This is how it happens: a man or woman will shed their garments as they have shed all else, loves and fancies, passions and friendships, and lie themselves down on the wooden table for their second birth. The vivimancers are unhurried as they attach the pads and wires with skilful hands, then offer the cup of aconite speaking a calm reassurance. Its taste is bitter, always, but the suppliant will drain it to the dregs and lay their head down, eyes closing; then the draft and the words and the arcing light will purge them of remorse and guilt, of pain and shame, and when they awake, in a little while, they are empty and peaceful, beyond the shore of life.

\--

‘Look at you.’ The voice was low, no more than a wind sifting through ashes, but its mockery carried clear. ‘A prince among vampir.’ 

Shadows under the wall of his dwelling, and in the deepest shadow, a figure of rags and matted hair. The sun was set, only its very last light still reddening the horizon; at this hour Goodnight would be locking his door, following the street up towards their private arbour of stone and ivy, where the first bats would be venturing out from the rock wall above to flit and squeak. 

‘He does us honour, to walk among us.’ Of no consequence: Roche brushed the insult from him as one might a fly. 

The figure stirred to its feet and drifted closer; she was of his kind, her pallor and her eyes told it, but fate had not dealt kindly with her: the flesh had shrivelled from her leaving her bony and hollow-faced. ‘You drink from your thrall, and it deceives you, striding along the street like a liveman, that you belong to this place.’ 

_Be off_ , was on his lips, as the livewoman had said to him, but something in her knowing sideways look silenced him. ‘You and I have no dealings together,’ he said instead, ‘my business is elsewhere,’ and perhaps his tone was a little princely. 

‘Of course it is. Above.’ She sketched a courtesy, parodying it, then raised her face to his. ‘I was like you, before. Newcome, still proud and pretty, and there was a woman.’

He shrugged, a pretence of indifference. ‘I do not need to hear your story.’ 

‘Oh,’ she said, hand settling on his arm, ‘the prince does not wish it. But yes, my liege, I think you do need to hear it.’ Roche strained to free himself, but her grip was powerful, as though the soft flesh had burned away to leave only the wiry strength at the core. 

‘She was not a young woman, this one,’ said the vampir, ‘but faded and run to fat, thinking love was over for her. And I made her mine. _Fool_ , they said to her, _fat old fool_ , but she believed in it, in me. She would burn bright when I kissed her, hot and quick, and she would let me drink while she moved against me and cried aloud in her pleasure.’ 

‘This tale is yours, not mine,’ he said, but she paid him no attention. 

‘I made her my milkcow, fed from her when I wished, and then – I remember it still, how everything seemed sharp and clear, and I was myself once more. I had ambitions. I would have others to rule, a herd of humans, and I would be kind: they would appreciate my guidance and my protection, come to love me even. _She_ loved me.’

Grasping for self-possession, Roche looked at her. ‘And yet you are here, at my wall, and you do not seem to be a just ruler, or a queen.’ 

She smiled sharp at that, _at my wall_ , as though he had spoken his part to please her. ‘They name us parasites, the Thanati, and they are right: it is our nature, to take. I took, too much, too greedily, my mind dazzled by the future I would have, and now I am a beggar again.’ 

Her hand gripped tighter with the urgency of her words, claws digging painfully. ‘Will you learn this lesson? How long before you drain him dry? He will not refuse: he will cry out and move against you, will plead and promise, and you will not hold back. I did not.’ 

‘Get away from me,’ he hissed, sickened anew at the vision of what he was, and she skipped away as quick as a cat before he could strike. 

‘There is my lesson for you, princeling.’ The mockery was back. ‘Master yourself, tend him well and perhaps he will last you some time after all.’ 

She melted away into the falling night, but her words remained like drops of sizzling poison on the stones at his feet. 

Roche leaned against the wall, eyes closed, the stone rough to his touch. He clung to his pride, it was true, and it was as she had said: the blood unstintingly given had freed him from craving or frenzy and cleared his mind. He was an image of what could be, a vampir with willing partner to feed and sate him. But to have it painted for him in the colours of honesty; to have it held to the unmerciful light of day and shown in its wincing truth… Roche had no doubt such dreams danced and spiralled in every head huddled against the painful sunlight, too hungry to truly rest: _Give me one to drink from. Just one_. 

He raised his head, unseeing, clutching at the wall. Was that all Goodnight was? Not prey, nothing so noble: a docile animal, to be kept in health, cared for, named, even, but in the end, his food? Self-hatred squirmed in his chest. Goodnight was his friend. He had opened himself wide, offering everything he was, had plucked Roche from the endless nightmare of his fate and given him back laughter, interest, kindness. This was not how one treated with a friend.

At the thought of it, of brushing aside the ivy and taking his seat beside him, drinking in the faint warmth and living scent of him, of leading his confidences and laughing low, their shoulders brushing as they leaned together, of the hand suspended above his hair, longing to touch as he drank, Roche’s stomach turned. _You will not hold back. I did not_. And instead of upward, his steps faltered and retreated, slow at first, then quicker; the iron gate clanged behind him in his haste, and a laugh as thin and dry as ashes seemed to come fluttering on the breeze.

\--

 _Below._ Who ever went below? Even a newcomer would recognise the miasma of hunger and despair which shrouded the ghetto at the city’s foot and turn their steps away. What need to walk there and see closer those who courted Liveside’s charity? But if you did, what would you find? 

Across the river, its green waters shallow and slow around your ankles, you would step onto streets of packed earth, winding narrow and mean between little leaning huts and shanties; a dog might snap furtively at your heels, but not even a cur would follow far into this place. A strange lifeless air, no garden or tree, no shops or market, not even heaps of refuse to attract a desert scavenger; and in the light of day, no man or woman to be seen here. 

Yet passing by a window draped with tattered canvas or an unlatched door, there would still come an uneasy sense that your presence was known, heads lifting from shallow slumber to mark and measure your footsteps, senses alert to the breath dry in your throat, even to the faint thud of your heart. Bold though you are, stranger, you would be unwise to let darkness fall on you here. 

\--

Where the road narrowed before it passed under the Lune Gate a set of shallow steps led down into what seemed a disused garden, where paved paths led past half-walls and crumbling statues to a sundial. Few bothered to come here, and even fewer to look beyond, where the paths ran out and the ground becoming uneven in a scatter of broken columns and barely-sketched foundations, the long-forgotten remnant of Vesontio’s past. Up against the rough rock face at the very back the ivy grew thick, and in its shelter Goodnight sat unseen, face lifted, listening. 

Footsteps echoed distantly along the road, but they were too many and too heavy: some lord with his attendants, perhaps. In other cities there might have been shouts from taverns, trysting lovers under windows, late vendors touting for trade, but here, silence ruled. First Goodnight thought, _he is late, perhaps something has detained him_ ; time passed, not even a bell to chime the passing hour, and Goodnight thought, _he has tired of this_ , and yet he waited still, the breeze cool on his skin but not cold enough to drive him away. _I can wait a little longer_ , he told himself, and after a while the moon came swimming up to keep him company, her wan light glinting on the leaves and broken stones; but Roche did not come. 

The wind blew stronger, making him shiver, and all in a moment it was as though he stood outside himself, looking at where he had come to. _Thralled?_ The word had stung, though he shook it off, but it returned to him now. _It was I who took him to the belvedere and kept him from discovery; I who called out to him, not he to me. I am not his thrall._ But here, sitting alone in the night, listening for his quick footstep, knowing how his heart would quicken at his half-smile, at his cold delicate touch – what was there to deny? _I am a fool_. Goodnight stood, shrugging his coat closer around him, and left the ruins to the bats and the moon.

In his neat orderly room he slept the night through and for once his dreams were peaceful; rising in the morning he opened the shutters to let in the sunlight, and said to himself, _It is done_. He felt nothing but a flat calm, carrying him through his business while he went with Lark up to the citadel, while he stood in Vauban’s audience-chamber and received his instructions, while they planned how best matters might be directed towards the General’s interest in the casino parliament of Maru’ahm. ‘One last journey,’ Vauban promised as they parted, ‘and on your return, you shall join us here.’ Goodnight inclined his head. _An ending, and a beginning_.

After, he made his plans with Lark, how husband and wife might seem to journey together, then came back down to Liveside to begin his preparations in the market, speaking low in greeting as he made his purchases. He passed by the archway thoughtlessly, as he had done a hundred times before, and the twisting in his chest struck him open and unprepared. _This was where I first saw him._ And it burst on him all at once, a flood of ice coursing through his veins to grip his heart.

As deadman he would have status, power, even: he had thought, perhaps, that he could protect Roche, take him into his favour, an aristocrat’s caprice. But to imagine so was a liveman’s folly: why would he care? When it was done Roche would be nothing to him, no more than any other importuning beggar. The day would come when he would walk past him in this street, not just without acknowledgement, but without recognition.

A deadman might watch a sunset or a soaring eagle, find beauty in a woman or comfort in the fur of a cat. Did they, though? Did the Thanati lords ever climb to their towers to see the colours of dusk or pause to hear a bird sing? In Vauban’s mansion what he had seen was deadmen and women shut away in the still cold air, all appetite done. Food made of stone and wire, clockwork toys for pets: not even a passionless facsimile of love. No friendly hand, no caress, no touch of lips … those lips, scarlet with his own blood, that golden skin, those drowning eyes. _Roche…_

Midday, too bright for any vampir to be abroad. But not for a liveman to walk the city, leaving the towers above him, dropping down through Liveside, low and lower, to the very foot of the city where small stonebuilt houses fringed the curve of the river. Beyond, tumbledown huddles of sticks and canvas, but he need not seek there.

Roche had not named the place, nor had he described it, but their conversations had let fall sufficient indication, here and there, for Goodnight to follow his signs: a narrow alley leading to a neglected square; the slightest of paths worn in a corner’s dust; the rusted gate that swung open at his touch. _Here_. The light on the steps was faint, and a few feet along the stone corridor faded to an absolute darkness. Goodnight trailed a hand along the wall until he touched the space of the doorway. 

He stepped inside seeing only blackness, and heard the quick rustle as the vampir awoke. ‘It’s me,’ he said, swallowing. ‘I …’ Speaking into the dark, alone and trembling, words failed him; it was soot-black, and little dazzles of light spun uselessly at the corners of his vision. 

A chill hand slid over his neck, and a ghost of breath touched his cheek. ‘You must trust me, to be in such a place alone.’ 

He could hear the smile in his voice, and Goodnight turned, seeking blind, seeing with fingers and lips; as he brushed through silky hair and pressed his mouth to the dip of a cold throat he thought his heart would crack. 

‘Roche,’ he breathed, and two arms wound around him, impossibly gentle. Cool lips traced up the side of Goodnight’s face, sipping the sun from his skin as Goodnight whispered, ‘We should leave here, you and I.’


	4. Chapter 4

The wealth of Vesontio was fabled, and perhaps the stories were true, treasure enough in the cellars and vaults of its mansions to enrich a thousand men – precious stones, silver jewellery, works of art and artifice, chests of gold coins. Austere the undead lords might be, but they poured out their riches when needed: a bag of emeralds or tarnished ducats, a collar inlaid with ivory and nacre, to reward, to persuade, to stir invention or rebellion. A city so rich, and yet no walls to shelter it, no warrior caste to protect? A prize, and undefended: but no army had ever come to pillage, no would-be conqueror to demand tribute. A riddle, then.

An army might overrun the streets, crush quick and dead alike under an iron maul and strip the mansions of their wealth. But first an army must reach the city, and there – there was the heart of it. Vesontio lay high among the jagged peaks of the Shatterjacks, above a barren waste of bare rock: one man or two might thread a route through the passes, a determined trader cross the scablands with his camels, but an army? An army of men with oxen and carts, with troops and followers, must have rivers to drink, fields and forests to hunt and graze; and among these desolate slopes, what army could survive? The wealth of Vesontio was fabled, but the city had never had need of walls.

\--

These, his final days, should have brought with them a calm finality, a quiet closing of the book: he had thought to let go emotion, guilt and care, to spend a bloodless eternity in the service of his master’s plans. As Goodnight walked the streets he tried to summon up some sense of regret, that he would never see again the broad winding street and the great plaza, never walk the silent corridors of the mansion, never hear the noonday bell toll from the fane, sending up its flock of clapping doves. But there was no space for regret in his heart, no space for anything but a fierce beating hope. 

The days ran quick and fraught, pin-sharp with dreams and planning. To an outsider’s eye just one more journey, no different from before, the preparations as for two, husband and wife together: two mules to carry packs and barrels of water, a tent of hide, documents of introduction and instruction. Goodnight stood alongside Lark in Vauban’s chambers and marked their route on his map, sat with her under the vines in the courtyard of a tavern and explained who they would meet and how they must act; he took her to the market and advised her as she gathered her supplies. And in all this time he said nothing, his dream clasped close inside him like a lustrous pearl inside a shell. 

He had thought himself long done with love, part of a sunlit youth he barely remembered, the shape of it worn meaningless with time. But now he was reborn to love’s folly and carelessness, nothing real around him save the face of his beloved. His lips were cold, icy cold, but they were gentle: his nails were sharp and strong, but his touch on Goodnight’s arms was as delicate as the wing of a bird. 

Goodnight lay beside him, slid hands beneath his shirt to press marble skin until it warmed with borrowed heat and Roche’s lips turned hot under his. Roche drank, and so did Goodnight, great dizzying draughts of kisses, filling him up with hope and joy. In a place where passion is dust, appetite extinguished, they had lit a tiny flame, as golden as the lamplight, had found in each other what they needed, and they gave with gratitude and joy. 

Goodnight set his eyes on a future, ill-defined as fantasy must be: he and Roche together, in some crowded cosmopolitan place where they could live unremarked. In Myrshock, perhaps, or Cobsea, or even New Crobuzon itself, human cities where xenians, khepri and cactacae and garuda, walked unremarked. A man and a vampir might find their way in such a place, surely?

At the thought of it, the dream became vague: Roche must feed, on more than him, and without hunting, but there would be ways. Where men were poor might not coin be traded for blood? Roche perhaps could not transact it himself, his true nature too obvious to hide, but Goodnight might, quick and persuasive in a cityful of victims. 

The idea brought with it a shrinking, picturing himself seeking out beggars or exhausted labourers and passing a handful of coins, to see his lover feed on the dirty and destitute. But imagination soothed, furnishing a better image: Roche richly dressed, hair falling black and silky, admired, influential, blushing men and women offering willingly in appreciation and flattery, vying for his favour. _There will be a way_ , he told himself, _if I cannot see it now, there must_ , and in the meantime he gave to his lover without stinting. And in a succession of ecstatic nights and watchful days Goodnight’s time in Vesontio hurried to its close.

 

With the promise of a future he had become more circumspect, that none need think him other than Vauban’s man, sober and assiduous, confident in his reward. Yet one noonday, when he and Lark passed through the mansion gate together and out into the spilling sunlight, hot and dazzling after the sombre interior, she said unexpectedly, ‘I saw him here, you know. One evening. He spoke to me, to ask whose house.’ 

_That first sundown_ … He flared to anger: ‘You may call him by his name: he is not an animal.’ 

The corners of her mouth turned down as though she tasted something sour. ‘Roche, then.’ 

‘Perhaps he followed me because I was the only one to treat him as a man.’ He meant it as a reproof, and she fell silent, the skirts of her long coat flapping as they walked between the high blind walls of the mansions, and their squat shadows followed across the paved stones at their feet. 

‘Once we reach the grass country,’ he began, but she interrupted. ‘You bring him with us.’ 

Goodnight had hardened his resolve against the deceit, had convinced himself it must be the better way, yet the flat statement out in the bright sun brought a flood of shame. 

At his silence her lips tightened. ‘Do not do me the discourtesy of treating me as a fool. He comes with us.’ 

Goodnight took her by the arm: few were out in the day’s heat, the plaza empty but for a pair of quick clerks ascending and a troop of servants carrying a closed chair. ‘Yes, he comes with us. Nothing else alters: we will take our route to Maru’ahm, and fulfil our commission, and when all is done, you will return. You will have learnt the way.’ 

‘All planned,’ said Lark, ‘to the last hair.’ She looked at him sideways, green and narrow. ‘Were you going to offer me a choice?’ 

Goodnight made no answer. He had known it must come to this, late or soon: he could not hope to plead for her sympathy, and so had calculated to count on her ambition.

They struck down into Liveside, the irrepressible energy of the quick evident even in the midday heat: traders at their stalls, children chasing with muffled cries, women shaking out laundry to dry on a balcony. Lark planted herself in front of him suddenly, forcing confrontation. ‘You could stay. Leave his service, keep … Roche at your side.’ 

_Could he? Resign ambition, decline Vauban’s favour?_ There would be ways. He had no true profession, but a market-trader or a tavern-owner could make a living among the quick. It would be difficult, a lord’s patronage withdrawn: many would look askance. But it could be done, and in five years or ten, might all be forgotten, Goodnight the tavern-owner leading his quiet life, his vampir lover asleep in the dark below? _No_. If there was a better future to be found, it would not be here. The way before him was hard, and paved with betrayal, but his feet, both of their feet, were already set on it.

‘This is the way,’ he said, stiff and awkward. ‘I will see to it that your prospects are not harmed.’ 

‘Yes,’ said Lark, setting off again, ‘And so will I. Your folly will be yours alone.’ 

‘It will not rebound on you,’ promised Goodnight, as much to himself as to her. ‘You will return, and a place will be vacant. No one need suffer.’ 

At that she turned her head to look at him again, quizzical, then said, ‘Avert,’ with a gesture to deter ill-fortune; a childish thing, yet it set his teeth on edge. 

\--

The mountain trail wound up and down, not hard to follow, but the landscape was unforgiving, steep slopes of shifting scree, bare rocksides where the wind whipped gustily among shattered bones dropped by lammergeiers wheeling high overhead. A route to be learned, the way to patch together a safe passage: the stand of bushes that a mule could browse, the sheltered gulley to wait out a storm, the occasional basin where sweet water guttered from the rock, creeping shallow along a bed of dust and gravel until it succumbed and melted back into the earth. 

A child of the city, Lark had yearned for this moment, slipping free of the confines of her solemn home and out into the world at last, a world of colour and noise, emotion and life: unknown faces speaking unfamiliar tongues; races and creatures known only through picture or story – thick-skinned green cactacae, leaping vodyanoi, flapping wyrmen; great rivers, plains of grass, and at the world’s edge, the sea. But now it proved a slow kind of freedom, the mules picking down the jagged passes through the tumbled stones, their tiny caravan inching its way through a monotonous dry landscape. Any journey must begin and end with this tortuous route: it was a prelude, she told herself, an introduction, to the greater adventure. 

The vampir joined them after dusk that first day; they had made their camp under a scarp as the sun fell, shadow flooding up the slopes to meet them, had cooked over their fire. So high up the nights were cold, and when they were done Lark hugged her coat around her and sat warming her hands. At one moment they were alone, and the next there was a third beside them, a nightmare come out of the dark without even a footfall to announce him. Her skin prickled to gooseflesh, but Goodnight stood up eagerly to greet him; she saw the other raise a hand to his cheek, heard him say, ‘Goody,’ an intensity between them all too troubling to watch. 

She had been warned, as a child. _They are all the same_ , her grandmother had said, and they were all the same, ragged, desperate, hiding strength and cunning under a veneer of obsequience. _You do not let them close. You do not go below, after dark. You do not make the mistake of thinking them like us_. She had learned fear, and then its disguise, contempt, had passed by ignoring the outstretched hand and entreating plea. And now: a vampir as a travelling companion. A vampir with a name, in dark neat clothes, with long sooty hair and slanting cheekbones. This was no beggar: his hair was combed and tied, his head held high: he spoke freely to Goodnight in a low accented voice, laid a hand on his arm and laughed. 

She would not stay to see it, and went away to lie down in the tent of hide; she closed her ears to the murmur of their voices, drifting at last into sleep, and at sunup he was gone, the two of them setting off again in the cool morning light. 

 

Goodnight by day was cheerful and practical, showing her the indistinct marmot trails that might lead to a hidden spring, or expounding the complex order of Maru’ahm, where politics was a game at the gambling-table, laws staked on the throw of a dice, repression or reform on the turn of a wheel. She learned, drank it all in, and they could both pretend all was as it should be. But at evening Goodnight sat by the fire, tight as a spring with waiting in the flames’ light, and in her mind’s eye she saw the vampir running like a wolf along the trail of red iron and salt that betrayed them. 

Lark had learnt little of love in her short years: Vesontio did not admire or reward such behaviour. Ambition, wisdom, patience, yes. But love? It stood before her now. Goodnight was like a lantern, the flame of love burning in him clear to see: he looked at Roche with a dazzled enchantment, responded to his smallest word or gesture. In the vampir she thought to discern only cunning and appetite, Goodnight no more to him than a thrall or a pet, yet in his face, his hesitant smile and tentative touches she seemed to see a glimpse of the man he once was. 

An interloper to a pair of lovers: it would have been more awkward had circumstances been different. Roche did not try to address her, nor did he seek her company, but after a day or two she saw, this would not do. For a journey there must be an accord between them, some kind of accommodation, and in her heart she hated Goodnight a little for making it so. 

That evening when the sat at the fire and he manifested from the darkness, instead of leaving she stayed: Goodnight glanced at her, surprised, but Roche settled calmly across the fire from them, with a private murmured word to Goodnight. Straight-backed and cross-legged, he showed no sign of weariness, though he had followed their day’s journeying in a handful of hours. He met her eyes challengingly, and under his appraising gaze a twist of fear squirmed in her belly. She could not make herself smile as she said, ‘We are travelling companions: we should be better acquainted.’ 

Roche inclined his head but said nothing; Goodnight set himself to brewing tea, perhaps to fill the silence, though she was grateful for the warmth of the cup in the night’s chill when she took it from him. 

‘You serve the dead,’ said Roche suddenly, his expression curious. 

‘It is the way with us; we quick have our skills.’ _Surely he knew that_.

‘Yet you hunger for more.’ 

The turn of phrase disturbed her, but she said honestly, ‘I seek to know more of the world. And you need not say to me, the world is cold, it is cruel, better to stay at home; I have heard that song enough.’ 

Roche laughed at that, actually laughed, face lighting up into amusement. ‘I heard that song too, and I did not listen to it.’ 

And she thought then, _perhaps he was a boy like me, perhaps my dreams were his_ ; and for the first time she felt pity at the fate he had come to. ‘Did you see a great deal of the world?’ 

‘Some of it. Some remarkable, and much that was not. 'His eyes had grown distant, inward. ‘I am a long way from where I was born.’ 

‘As am I,’ said Goodnight with a smile. ‘We all seek something better.’ 

‘And now?’ Lark asked, aware she pressed on a bruise. ‘Why leave? I thought Vesontio a refuge for your kind.’ 

‘A refuge?’ Roche’s smile was a grimace. ‘I cannot say I found it so. I did not notice a welcome from the townsfolk.’ 

She would not colour at the memory of how she had spoken to him, that day in the street. Instead she pursued, ‘You will accompany us, then, to The Brothers and further?’ 

He started slightly at the question, though she could not tell why; ‘I will. Your journey will be the longer, I know.’ 

‘Usually we look for passage from Hinter on a dirigible,’ agreed Goodnight, ‘to cross the grasslands, but this time we will ride. A longer journey, but you will see and hear the more.’ 

Kindly meant, or turning her own words to persuade her? ‘There is much I can learn,’ she said carefully, then to Roche again, ‘You said you did not listen to those who said, best stay at home: were you glad you did not?’ A strange thing to ask, but no stranger than sitting in the darkness, cup in her hand, and speaking with a vampir. 

‘Glad?’ His tone was sombre. ‘Yes. There were times I was exhausted and hungry, times I was alone and desolate, but I never wished myself back to the place I had left. Not even _then_.’ His face was dark with memory, and Goodnight reached an unconscious hand towards him. ‘I still had hope. I thought Vesontio the end of my journey, but it was an illusion, not a place where I might be-‘ 

‘There is a place,’ interrupted Goodnight fiercely, ‘We will find it. We will make it, if we have to.’ 

 

To see them together, the sun and the moon, faces turned always to each other in a shared dream: it disturbed her. It all disturbed her. Roche was careful to keep a distance between them, but he spoke courteously to her and listened in his turn; and he was handsome, none could deny that, graceful and fine-featured. And Goodnight, what was he but charming, telling tales to bind the three of them together across the midnight fire, face alight in the rosy flicker of the flames. 

Perhaps it was contagion, their love-sickness so strong that even a practical soul was not entirely proof against it? When Lark slept, later, she dreamed of a man, indistinct, yet ardent and gentle. He drew her down beside him, her hair spilling around them like flame as they kissed: he spoke words of endearment and entreaty, trailed a lover’s fingers across her skin and set his burning lips to her breast, but whether he was dark or fair, and if his lips burned with heat or cold, she could not say. She desired him, yearned for him, yet though her arms wound tight around him he unravelled and became insubstantial, blowing away like smoke, and she woke again in the flat light of dawn with a pang of loss that was slow to fade.

\--

Each day led them further down the mountains, and each day the land around them became greener, little stunted pine trees interspersed with stands of coarse grass and cushions of moss. One noonday she and Goodnight came to a river, the first true river they had seen; beyond its further shore the land stretched away flat, the green thinning and vanishing: the beginnings of the scablands. 

Goodnight dipped his hand in the water, and she did the same: it was shallow and cold, but without the frigid touch of the high springs. ‘The Ghost river, or what will become it,’ he said soberly. ‘When you return you will be glad to see this.’ She let the water flow around her fingers, the current strong: _when you return_. ‘We will stay here a little: make sure to drink your fill.’ 

So they made camp, though the day was only half-spent, and she drank the water with its faint tang of metal to it, filled their water-barrels, and they idled through the afternoon; the mules wandered free to graze what they could, and Goodnight pitched the tent to doze in its shade. 

The aimless waiting grated on her nerves: she could see the sense in it, to feed and water their animals while they could and gather their forces for the arid journey ahead. Yet Lark could not rest, and instead went up the river a way, to look for birds she might trap, and all the hot afternoon she thought of the vampir, of Roche, waiting out the day like them, hidden away in some cave or crack, willing the sun to fall, Goodnight the lodestone of his thoughts. 

 

She came back empty-handed, expecting to find the fire lit and the kettle hot, but instead the tent was stowed and their campsite dark; Goodnight was loading the mules. She stood staring in blank astonishment but he smiled at her as though nothing was amiss. ‘We’ll go by night, from here. The mules will see as well as by day, and we’ll have the moon to light us.’ Sure enough, its disc was edging up in the east, yellow as old bone. 

‘You cannot mean…’ Out across the scablands by night? It was madness, and she could not but say so: ‘It is madness, to travel in the dark. Too dangerous, too slow…’ But even as she said it, she understood. No need to spell it out: among the peaks Roche might find a space beneath an overhang, a deep pass where the sun’s bite could not reach, a wall of rock above his head to protect him. But on this featureless plain there would be no refuge for him from the day’s brightness. His need of them was stark: before the first rays lit the plain he must be within their tent, muffled against the light, fearsome predator turned helpless prisoner. 

Goodnight had not paused in his preparations, but he said with his back turned, ‘I see you understand.’ 

_I will not be part of this folly_ , was on her lips. But if not, what then? This was the beginning, the chance she had longed for: she could not carry out their task alone. Could she allow this venture to come to nothing, and return to Vesontio with nothing to show? See the chance of status and freedom pass to another? She asked again, ‘Were you going to offer me a choice?’ But of course he was not. 

They forded the river and struck out into the plain of stone as purple dusk turned to night, the day’s heat still striking upward from beneath their feet: no trail to follow here, but they put the mountains at their back, striking out west and south, the moon casting their shadows sharp and black before them. It was slow going, turning wherever a fissure split their path, their way winding across and back on itself, and after an hour or two a dark man caught up behind them, walking under the moon. 

\--

The scablands: a shadeless plain stretching to the horizon, scoured bare by age-old floods until its bones of bare cracked rock showed through, seamed and fissured with sinkholes, and nothing between the land and the sun, no shade from the pounding heat, the dust alkaline and corrosive, its only water deceptive pools of shining blue, too sour and caustic to drink.

What creatures might there be, to live in such a place? In the mountains, water, sparse and intermittent, but enough to sustain hardy clattering goats, rock-coloured lizards and burrowing marmots, preyed on by the birds that wheeled overhead. Out on the plains, nothing so usual. In the scablands dwelt only creatures not entirely of the world: gluliche, flapping masses of sinew and leather, spreading dry wings at the echo of feet; mole-wasps, lurking in traps under a skim of dust where glassy-needled bushes drew nourishment from their leavings; bright poisonous salamanders eating the bitter dust. But why should a traveller fear, even if in the shimmering haze figures taller than a man seemed to waver and dance by the shore of a soda lake, when the creature all others feared walked beside him?

\--

Before dawn they set their makeshift camp, uncomfortably exposed in the barren landscape, and Roche lay down inside the tent, drawing Goodnight’s blanket over his head. The rising sun did not seem so fierce, but as it moved up the sky the force of its heat sent Lark, antipathy forgotten, to sit in the tent’s meagre shade. Goodnight sat the day through, drowsing, trying to keep his shadow above Roche’s head; they could hear him turning restlessly as the sun mounted higher and struck more powerfully, and at noon, when his shadow contracted to the smallest pool, Goodnight took up his coat and threw it over one side of the tent to shade it. He did not look at her, but after a while she got up to fetch her own and lay it besides. 

At sunfall, as they ate their cold supper Roche was slow to emerge: his eyes seemed clouded and he moved stiffly as though his skin pained him, and the moon was high again before he was able to walk with his accustomed grace. 

How long, to cross the desert of stone and dust? A week or more, for a seasoned traveller; difficult enough, but not impossible. Goodnight himself had done it half a dozen times. Travelling by night, though they had the vampir to guide them through the darkened world, was slower: even so, it could probably have been done. 

But each evening Roche needed a greater effort to rouse himself to motion, and he walked slow and dazed until the moon was well up; as the night drew on he would rally, skin fading to its accustomed pallor, his fluid grace returning; and he would lead them as long as he could, face turned from the lightening east. But every night they covered less ground, and though Roche uttered no complaint the toll it took on him was evident. 

In the waning hours of the night he might hunt, vanishing without a word to seek what prey the plain could offer, but animal blood could not sustain him, nor give him what he needed to survive the slow leeching of the long bright day. Only drinking restored him a little, and Goodnight would coax him: one night, when Roche had fed from him three days in a row he tried to refuse, hissed and slapped his hand away; but Goodnight simply took his knife, held his blade in the flame a moment, then cut his arm himself, holding it dripping black in the twilight until Roche could not resist. 

And strong though Goodnight was, the constant bloodletting weakened him too: Lark saw him sometimes lean on his mule to steady himself as though his head swam, and one night as they negotiated a slender bridge across a chasm his steps began to waver and his eyes to close as though in sleep; she barely rescued him with a clutch at his sleeve. Such folly, in a man of years, but what is love save folly?

Slow, and slower. It seemed they must traverse this plain forever, its end sinking ever beyond their reach, the two of them walking hand in hand to the abyss. _Folly and madness_. 

 

Of course there was a way. Had Goodnight reckoned as much? Looking in his eyes by day she saw only guileless blue; but night shrouded them to a knowing dark. 

Lark woke under a fading sky. Beside the tent Goodnight lay like a fallen soldier, claimed by sleep after a restless day’s watching, and for a while she too lay looking upwards to where the early stars were beginning to show. She had carried it inside her, this growing realisation, and now it came fully-formed before her; she cursed Goodnight for bringing her to it, cursed Roche as a monster, a deceiver, even as she cursed herself for the sympathy she could not restrain. _If I were hungry enough, if I could hunger but could not die, and must go on in desperation and need_ … It must be now, she knew, it would not improve with waiting.

The light had leached what colour there was from the landscape, and she stood up in the twilight, Goodnight too exhausted to wake at her movement. _It is a small thing_ , she told herself, _the quick in the city think nothing of it_. A moment’s impulse, a hasty transaction: a few choking swallows, laced with pity and contempt: why make more of it than than it was? But still, it was hard to make herself approach, to lift the flap of the tent to its dark interior, strong with the rank scent of a predator. 

Roche stirred at her approach, head lifting, and as she knelt beside him the faint light falling from behind her showed her not the handsome dark lover of her dream, but a blistered scarecrow, skin bubbling and face a rictus of pain. He swayed, reaching for her, already mesmerised, and it took all the control she possessed not to recoil, to run, and instead to hold out her wrist to do what must be done at last.

\--

Roche drank. Head splitting from the hammering day, skin cracked by the unbearable light, eyes dimmed and wits scattered, all he knew was the living pulse that called to him. The lure was irresistible, and he fastened his teeth in her wrist without thought or finesse, blood scoring across his tongue, rich and vital. Life came flooding into him, and in its intoxicating gush he tasted fear and revulsion, ambition and stubborn will all mingled together. 

He drank without restraint, and he knew he must say, _enough_ , must stop and put aside the proffered arm; yet he kept on taking, gasping like a drowning man, as she shivered under his touch. _I must stop,_ he told himself, _I am a man, not a beast_ ; swallow after ravenous swallow, and it seemed he spoke it aloud, ‘Stop.’ But when he raised his head, mouth sticky and hot, when he turned his face towards the last of the light and she the same, it was Goodnight standing in the tent’s entrance, his face in shadow, who said to him, ‘Enough.’

Goodnight, his refracted sun, the light to which he turned his face; Goodnight who had made him a man again, had called him back to the sunlit world, and held out to him the vision of a different fate. And Roche had grasped at the dream, made it his own: that he could be more than he was. That he need not suffer the slow agonising fall to a life of beggary and degradation, his clothes wearing thin and turning unheeded to rags, his hair and nails growing long. That he need not seek a life beyond humanity, no more than hunting and the dark, thirst and satisfaction, trapped in deathless existence until there was no more complexity in his thoughts than those of a fox or a hawk. Roche had clung to his remembered humanity, had made himself friend and lover, and together they had conjured up their future. 

In rational moments he recognised its impossibility – trading coin for blood? Persuading men and women to set aside horror and disgust ingrained over centuries? – but then Goodnight would come to him, live and laughing, scented of sun and animal vitality; he would set a hand to his cheek, opening himself up like a flower in the rain, and the dream would drive practicality from his mind once more. 

And here was where it was ending, days spent on the rack of burn and scald, each worse than the last; the painful awakening, when thirst would rule him, when they must offer and he must take; the night, step after aching step, the way impossibly long yet never long enough. The three of them, trapped in a helpless mesh: Goodnight, torn between gratitude and jealousy, the woman, all anger and fear and unnamed desire, and him, the animal that called itself a man: as far behind them as stretched ahead, always at the centre of the sky’s cloudless bowl, and each day their steps grew slower, faltering side by side, the vision retreating before them, shimmering like a mirage.

 

 _Folly and madness_. At night he would determine to spare them both, to leave, but when dawn came to light the east his resolve would crumble: where in this expanse of shadeless rock was there for him to hide? Without a tent, without protection, he might see out one day, blistered and raving, but a second would surely kill him, if the scablands’ bony predators did not find him first. 

Then he would resolve, if he would not leave, at least to make himself proof against the outstretched arm, to find the control he had exhibited so effortlessly in the city. He said to them, ‘I will not, not from either of you,’ and for a day and another he held himself in check.

But on the third day Goodnight came to him at sunset, a calculated move, slipping into the tent as he lay weak and pained. The freshening breeze came with him to cool Roche’s inflamed skin and clear his head, and he struggled for calm, for reason. He expected Goodnight to let his blood run, to tempt him with its scarlet gush, hot and coppery, and even then, so recently fed on a savour new and fresh, he might have been able to refuse. 

Goodnight pulled the tentflap closed and tied it, then knelt beside him: a hand hovered over his cheek without touching, and in his lover’s face Roche read many things: pity, jealousy, anxiety and a need that mirrored his own. 

Goodnight set both hands to his shirt, trembling slightly as he unfastened it and slid it from his shoulders. Warmth radiated from the expanse of skin revealed, not the painful heat of daylight but the heady warmth of life, and despite himself Roche raised a hand to touch. Goodnight shivered as the pads of his fingers drew the heat from his skin. 

_No_ , breathed Roche, but he could no more have resisted than a parched traveller at a clear spring: he surged up to press himself against him, burying his face at the join of his neck where the pulse ticked wildly. Goodnight drew in a shuddering breath and tightened his arms around him: ‘Take,’ he whispered, ‘make me yours.’

Roche fastened his teeth in Goodnight’s sunwarmed flesh, and instantly he was lost in a rush of cascading scarlet, driven by the beat of his heart. Heat ran under his skin, turning him for a brief while from waxen statue to living man, and Goodnight trembled in his embrace, gasping in wordless pleasure as the life swirled out of him. 

Roche raised his head to kiss him, fierce and savage, too consumed with appetite to be gentle, and Goodnight licked greedily into his mouth, sharing the taste of his own blood. Then Roche bent again to draw from his vein, hot and sweet and coppery; he had not drunk like this for half a year, not full deep drafts of living flame, and never with a victim so eager to give. _You will not hold back_ , said the voice somewhere behind him, and Roche did not. 

\--

After, he stood, leaving Goodnight lying pale on the blanket. He felt himself whole again and healed, the frenzy lifted, and now he saw with clarity the truth he would not admit. _I can say_ , I am not an animal, _but that is what I am_. 

Goodnight’s chest rose and fell in shallow breaths; he would wake, weak and drained, but Roche was filled with loathing at what he had so nearly done. _If I persist in this, what will I do but drag him down with me? I am a hunter, and a hunter should be alone in the dark_. 

He knelt and pressed cool lips to Goodnight’s brow, though his eyelids did not flicker under the caress, and stayed beside him a moment longer, stroking his hair; then a shadow moved under the waning moon, and Roche had vanished.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NB: This is not the last chapter: count has gone up to 4/5.
> 
> Speak to me: fontainebleau22.tumblr.com


	5. Chapter 5

At first Goodnight could do no more than sit his mule in a daze, head singing under the beating sun, and slide from its back, weak and dizzy, at day’s end; had they not been so close to the edge of the scablands, where they could find shade and sweet water once more, even with Lark’s aid he might have struggled to survive.

They did not speak of Roche: what was there to say? But Goodnight did not miss Lark’s sidelong glance each morning, the gaze that lingered on his skin, his teeth. 

‘It was not that way,’ he told her, ‘you know as well as I, to offer to a vampir holds no risk.’ 

It was not quite the truth: when a vampir drank so deep, so unreservedly, there must be a chance of contagion, though slender, but the days passed and Goodnight grew stronger, suffering no fever as the marks on his body faded. 

_He will come back_. It beat in him night and day, sure as the sun would rise and set, the season turn: _he will come back. He left to save us, to save him from himself; now we are safe, he will return_.

Where the barrens ended there began a great plain of grass, rippling green from horizon to horizon. To see it from afar was to imagine a field of wheat, waist-deep, but these grasses were tall, their frothy seed-heads waving above a rider’s head. From above they made a sea of unbroken emerald, but inside the stems glinted with shades of mauve and scarlet, russet and cobalt, and the nodding starlike blossoms let down scatters of golden pollen as they thrust through the stalks below. This was a place that teemed with life: small shy rodents that skittered through the roots, herds of leggy striped pigs leaping nimbly away, and the lean cat-like creatures that stalked them. 

And here too were the first human settlements since the city, small dun villages in arenas cleared of vegetation, simple hunters, their horizons cramped to the width of a city square, the tall stems closing in all around. They were hospitable, curious about a traveller and his wife, offering a grass hut with a mat of woven grass to lie down on, and biting green beer brewed from the pulped blades. They spoke Rohagi of a kind, and Goodnight would sit and listen to their fireside tales; at last he would prompt with a soft question or two, leaning forward, despite himself, in hope.

Sometimes he thought him close, felt his eyes upon him as they rode, head swimming from the cloying grass scent and the puffs of pollen; sometimes he woke past midnight and lay, eyes tight shut, knowing that Roche was beside him, silent as a hunting cat, waiting for the touch of those cold lips on his cheek. Yet at other times, Lark chattering beside him in her floppy hat, a feather tucked into its band, he thought him far away, gone wandering like the dark soaring birds that crossed the sky and vanished again.

The grass country seemed unending, an ocean in which they might lose themselves forever, but they moved southwards each day and one morning came at last to a place where the stems thinned out abruptly, an army halted in its march, giving way to open country dotted with stands of low spreading trees. And at last, something that might be called a town, a cluster of four-square wooden buildings: trading posts and market stalls, places to drink and places to board, a road along which infrequent carriages would bounce, and behind, a cluster of tether-towers where bobbing aerostats were moored. 

Lark stared like a child at the swelling gasbags drifting in the breeze, the wooden gondolas suspended below and the pilots swinging up and down the ladders to their craft, and Goodnight could not but be warmed by her enthusiasm, even as his own heart sank. 

‘We’ll take passage from here,’ she said, and it was no more than logic: an aerostat could cross the expanse of the Galaggi veldt in a week, recouping the time they’d lost: yet to hear in her words so plainly the confidence that Roche would not return squeezed his heart in his chest. 

‘Hinter is no metropolis’ he said soberly, ‘but we can take a few days’ rest: find fresh provision and fresher news than we have.’ 

Lark gave him a measuring look. ‘It will not serve to let the moment run through our hands.’ 

Goodnight kept his gaze on the town in front of them. ‘Haste is for the quick,’ he said mildly, ‘what seems long to us is the blink of an eye to the dead.’ 

Lark shook her head in irritation, bolder now. ‘An apple left too long on the tree will blight in the frost.’

\--

Rarely do the truedead walk among the living. Some will, at first, when the preoccupations of life are still bright in their mind, desire still burning to see a war won, a rival defeated, a human lifetime’s work complete. Vauban had been one such, when he was still young, striding through the smoke and thunder of a battlefield, rallying men to tip the scales of fate in his favour. 

But he, like all the Thanati, before long had withdrawn from the world to the cool dimness of his mansion in the quiet unchanging citadel, his plans grown longer and more complex, his play upon the threads of history progressively more subtle – a bribe to see a law passed here, a marriage brokered between two merchant houses there, a visionary project, a canal or a railroad, underwritten in secret. What hope in a single mortal life to understand these long rhizomic schemes, spreading slow as the web of a fungus? 

As time stretched out and decades turned to centuries, to the lords of the dead the lives of the quick must surely dwindle, becoming in the end no more than the span of a buzzing fly. An older lord might watch a city grow, see it engulfed in flames, then rise from its ruins only to burn again; he might witness change on a geological scale, the retreating forest or the engulfing marshland, the coast marching inexorably away from once-prosperous towns, leaving them to slow mortification, canals landlocked and warehouses empty. 

In the end, it seemed, the weight of centuries lay so heavy, the bodies of the dead so sere and calcified, that the living world which had been first their occupation and later their pastime became finally an annoyance, and sequestered in their mountain fastness, their gaze turned inwards to the contemplation of the eons, the palace, after all, become a tomb. Who of the quick could compass it, the blessing and curse of immortality?

\--

As a child Lark’s favourite game was the one she and her companions played in the garden behind the fane, where the dead leaves and encroaching ivy could be brushed away to reveal a broad avenue of cracked mosaic tiles, the aisle of an earlier temple long fallen to ruin. The yellowed squares stretched in a dense and complex pattern of colours and symbols – stars and leaves, shells and acorns, lilies and roses, in watery blues and faded purples, dull reds and pale greens; the challenge, to flip the counter just so, quick and accurate, to the blue leaf or the white rose, and plot a course a child’s steps could follow, blue shell to red leaf, white star to green rose, all the way to the great bird at the path’s end.

Too easy to choose the wrong branch, take one wrong step and be halted, staring at dead ends all round. Lark had been skilled at it, standing amid the tiles with a pebble in her hand, paths coiling around her feet alive with potential: the pattern would come clear in her mind, and she would send her stone bouncing and set her feet without hesitation, her way already determined and the prize within her grasp. 

The seed of doubt, already set and rooted, had blossomed at Goodnight’s words: did he intend to drag out their wait in this dusty staging-post, a prisoner to hope? He had inched through the grassland seeking word of his lover and found none: now surely the fever must burn out to leave him clear-minded once more. For herself, the vampir’s departure had left her freed as from an enchantment, her actions, her acquiescence, as unreal as a night’s visions at morning. 

She could not conceal her impatience to be on their way at last, and though Goodnight wore a sorrow as heavy as his militia coat he had reluctantly agreed; they took a room a room at a quiet boarding-house, where Goodnight knew the sleepy-eyed woman who took their coin, then they went together to find a pilot. 

Lark looked eagerly around as they threaded their way among the tether-towers: at the foot of one the open door of a workshop let out a gout of naphtha sparks and steam, at the next a net of casks was being carefully lowered from the craft above, while next again a team of men hauled on a rope to raise a cage of bleating goats. Pilots hailed them as they passed, touting for custom to Neovadan, to Shankell, to Myrshock, but Goodnight, though he greeted them cordially, shrugged off their calls to bargain, leading her instead to the furthest of the towers. 

Here an aerostat’s buff leather bag bobbed saggily halfway from the top, its gondola swinging low, and at the tower’s base a man with a tangle of dark hair crouched over a disassembled engine, its brass pipes, pistons and firebox laid out like a puzzle. 

‘Carmine!’ 

At Goodnight’s hail the man stood and stretched, easing his neck, then turned to greet them: he was short and powerful, unexpectedly young, and dressed in a skin vest that revealed bulging muscles, more like to anchor his vessel to the ground, Lark thought, than help it rise. 

‘Goodnight.’ He offered a hand. His face was tattooed, his expression hidden behind it, but she had not come so far to be cowed, so she gave him an honest greeting and a bow, and met his appraising gaze with her own. 

‘Passage west again?’ he asked Goodnight brusquely. ‘I’ve a party of surveyors to take to the coast.’ 

‘West’s where we’re going,’ said Goodnight, and though he guarded his face carefully, Lark saw the muscle in his jaw tick as he added, ‘if you can take two more.’ 

‘Room enough.’ Carmine jerked his head and Lark looked up at the craft close above her head: a compact cabin, its glassed-in front grimy, wrapped around by a deck with a tarnished brass rail; the housing for the engine sat before the tail-fin, and at the prow a complex tangle of hawsers and pulleys linked to the struts and flaps that controlled the balloon. It seemed impossible to her that such a weight of wood and brass and passengers and fuel could be lifted by the wallowing gasbag. ‘Thirty finials if you bring your own provision,’ Carmine offered, and Goodnight struck hands on the bargain. 

‘How soon?’ asked Lark; the pilot turned back to survey the entrails of the engine glinting in the sun. ‘Retool this and refit it; test the bag and check her over. Three days, might be.’ 

More days, slipping through her fingers. Were the two of them in league? Goodnight noted her sharp suspicious look, and as they left Carmine to his work, ‘A good pilot, and trustworthy,’ he said, ‘that repays the wait,’ and she supposed she must believe it. 

There was enough of the town to keep her occupied, no doubt of that: Hinter, unimpressive as it might be, was a place of exchange, and here were passengers glad to have the ground under their feet for a night or two, pilots drinking as friends or rivals, complaining of unreliable winds and city taxes, traders come from out of the grass or across the plains, some with carts of merchandise and travelling stalls, and a few with no more than a bundle of clothes and weapons and no taste for questions. 

It was all so new to her, so raucous and entertaining: mountebanks shouting their games, taverns bursting out gales of laughter and shouts, traders crying their wares: in the bazaar that lined the streets striped hides and pipes of grass stem lay stacked beside painted instruments of clay and uncut stones; amulets of feather and claw to protect dangled above hexed bundles of yarrow sticks and mummified lizards to bury under an enemy’s doorstep. 

Goodnight took no share in her interest; by day he seemed as voluble and cheerful as before, reforging old acquaintances and striking new, casting for the scraps of information that were his livelihood, but there was a brittle quality to him, a tension which wound taut as each day went on, and tauter still when evening fell. He would sit a little while with her in the eating-house, listening to the chatter than ebbed and flowed around them, but soon he would leave to sit alone in their room and write in his notebook, or simply to stare at the page before him. When Lark lay down to sleep he would say to her, ‘I will read a little longer,’ and later, when he blew out the candle, he would sit again in darkness, unmoving for so long that she never saw when finally he limped to his bed. 

She offered no comment, Roche an unspoken weight between them, but as he sat one evening the question rose to her lips unbidden: ‘Will you come back again, after?’ 

Goodnight looked up from his book with clouded eyes, as though he hauled himself from a great distance, and she asked again, ‘When our task is complete?’ 

He looked at her then as though he pitied her; ‘Vesontio is a grave,’ he said simply, ‘my time there is done. I will not return to rake through the decay and the dust.’ 

The words troubled her, the sunlit city of her memory, its citadel bright above its steep streets, scorned as no more than the carved stone case of a sarcophagus. _Folly_ , she told herself firmly, _he may style it so when his lover is gone and his dream unravelled. But I will return, alone if need be, I will stand before the General in his audience chamber and begin my road to ascension_. She rolled herself in her blanket, turning her back to where Goodnight sat with pen in hand in a tiny pool of light. _This is a beginning, not an end_.

\--

There is never a shortage in towns like Hinter, with their passing carriages, itinerant traders and ferrying aerostats, of travellers’ tales, men and women vying with one another in the taverns to boast of the strangeness they have seen. The great Galaggi Plain, where vast chelonas carry whole townships on their backs and diligent wineherds graze their vinhogs on sunny slopes; the teeming, brutal cactacae port of Shankell on the Meagre Sea, its gadiatorial arenas open to all comers; even New Crobuzon itself with its skyrails and factories, sprawling and violent, inventive and cruel – all too familiar, too workaday to impress.

No, travellers boast of stranger places they have dared to visit: the perilous crocodile city of The Brothers, spreading like two open jaws along a silty river; the desert of the Cymek, where feathered man-birds with beaks and claws soar on the updrafts to hunt; Gharcheltist, home of the batrachian vodyanoi, its basilicas and plazas carved by arcane craft from water itself and lit by submerged lamps in the frigid depths of the Cold Claw Loch. A very few will even tell the greatest travellers’ tale of all: of Vesontio, the silent city where the living are servants to the dead and death itself is advancement, keenly sought.

And perhaps this is the truth that all travellers share: wherever your home, whether the streets you walked as a child were flooded and dim or pillared with curving bones, whether you crossed stone bridges over a network of canals, or rickety metal skywalks over clanking railyards, whether the temple squares ran red with sacrifice or gushed rills of fresh water, the further you leave it behind you, the more it slips from your grasp, until your own memories, of streets are broad and quiet or mean and clogged, of a sky bright with flags and spinning weathervanes or dark with smoke and brick dust, seem to belong to a place unknown, your past transformed to a story told by a stranger in a crowded tavern. 

\--

Both of them were lost in dream when Roche came, slipping through the darkened town silent as smoke. He had never been far. He had fled, in terror of what he might do, but he had lingered, followed, torn between hope and despair, traitor to himself: was it love that drew him back to look on Goodnight in the firelight, as he believed, or only hunger? Did he thirst for the quenching water of his touch, the honey of his voice, or for the wine of his rich coppery blood? _I am an animal_ , he told himself, _I can do him only harm; I am a man_ , he said, _he is my only hope_. So he had struggled, at war within his heart, grieving with Goodnight’s grief and yearning with his devotion. 

Now he sifted through the streets along the silvery lure that called him: a dog raised its head as he passed, but found him gone before it could draw breath to bark. He paused at one door, and another; then a latch lifted soundlessly beside a slumbering doorman. Through the inn, with no more footfall than the moonlight which crept through the skylight, and Roche found what he sought. Here the woman lay, face turned away, and there, tumbled finally to sleep like a sailor drowned at sea, one arm flung out, Goodnight. Roche could make out the fading marks on his wrist and neck: he stood at his bedside for a long time, drinking in his scent as warmth flowered in his unbeating heart. 

Goodnight made no movement that betrayed his quickening from sleep to wakefulness, but the tenor of the room changed: Roche, black in the blackness, sensed him strain and listen, felt him breathe and hope. His hand was poised to touch, a whispered word on his lips, yet he held himself still, time suspended, savouring the piercing joy to come. Then he reached to graze Goodnight’s cheek with his fingers and Goodnight turned his face into his touch, shivering in chill and delight. Roche dropped to his knees to press them together and it was as though he held the sun in his arms, melting into his coldness and warming him to the core, whispering in his ear, _I knew you would come back_.

Behind them Lark stirred, sighing an indistinct word in her dreams; Roche took Goodnight’s hand. ‘Come,’ he murmured, and Goodnight rose and let his lover lead him trusting through the dark, leaving Lark to sink and sleep again. 

The town was still, the moon a low crescent before them: they did not speak, but leaned together as they walked, intoxicated with each other’s nearness. A night breeze stirred the grass to whispers at their approach, and Roche found them a place where they could lie unseen, stems rising above their heads like the pillars of a ghostly cathedral. 

Life was all around them: the plaintive cry of a nightbird, a rabbit that lifted its head, ears twitching, then bent to feed again, jerboas that jumped at their feet with eyes as bright as beads. And here was Goodnight, life rising strong in him most of all; hot, so hot, his skin under Roche’s hands, his lips trailing kisses down his neck, his limbs winding tight around him like the roots of the grass. 

At his arm outstretched Roche hesitated, the memory of his frenzy still sharp, but Goodnight drew him down in wordless trust; Roche’s teeth pierced his skin, delicate and gentle, a lovers’ sacrament and it all ran together – the rush of blood under the skin and the susurration of the grasses above, their breathless gasps of pleasure and the cough and bark of a hunting fox, the touches of hands as slow and irresistible as the swimming moon. 

After, Roche lay with his head pillowed on Goodnight’s lap while Goodnight let handful after handful of his silky hair slide through his fingers. It seemed to Roche a timeless space, the stars unmoving above the waving grass-flowers, as though he could lie forever, feeling Goodnight’s gentle caress, catching his hand in his cold fingers to kiss. He saw nothing but his lover, his eyes of darkest blue like a stormy sea, a joy writ on his face that spoke his own, and for a long while they were silent, rapt in love refound.

But the earth turned, as it will, and when the sky began to lighten, when the sun, still hidden, touched the clouds above to the palest of reds, Roche finally spoke his unwilling truth. ‘There is no path for us from here.’

Their journey, so hard-won, their love new-born; yet as he had waited and watched Roche had seen only dead ends at every turn, the plans so lightly made in their conversations up on the city battlements become so difficult in execution. He had seen the aerostats, had watched as Goodnight bargained for passage, but how could he hope to conceal himself on such a journey? Across the plains, riding by night? They could not draw out the time so, even if the woman would agree. Back along the slow scorching road they had come? Unthinkable. 

He could see no answer, and all around him now lay the danger of recognition, of revulsion and fear. In the city he had been a man; here he was a rumour, a fireside story, a nightmare to be hunted down. Goodnight might take him in his arms and say, _It is not so_ , but it was: all their love had been in the city, of the city; they had left, and the vision that lured him had paled and retreated before his eyes, until it wisped to nothing.

Goodnight’s hand had paused when Roche spoke, then resumed its caressing, unperturbed. ‘There is a way,’ he said, and at what he thought he heard in the words Roche surged up to face him, clutching at his arms. 

‘I will not.’ Goodnight, his flame of hope, his last connection to the daylight world: to let him leave his home, abandon his future, set all at hazard for his sake, only to bring him to this poisoned existence: what betrayal could be more profound?

Goodnight did not wince at his fierce grip, just reached to touch his lips and forestall his protest. ‘The road of despair is one we need not walk: I do not ask that.’ His eyes searched Roche’s face, so earnest, alight with love. ‘I will find the way, I swear. Give me a day; tell me where and I will come to you.’ 

Roche knew it for madness, this determined clutching at the shreds of hope, but bound by Goodnight’s touch, bathed in his warmth, the truth of his blood still on his tongue, he let belief spring up within him once more, inevitable and treacherous as the dawn.

\--

Their dream: perhaps it had always been too vain, too fragile to withstand the cold reality of the world. Might it have been different, with wealth and influence to use? A closed carriage, a private aerostat, a ghostly ship: a shuttered mansion let in a city, its servants discreet; evening salons lit by flickering candlelight where a handsome reclusive master offered favours to the fair and ambitious? In a city where jaded palates yearned for novelty, where youth aspired to decadence and dissolution perhaps it could have been so.

Or more grandiose in imagining still, a kingdom, as the vampir-woman had dreamed: some isolated fiefdom, where a vampir, preternaturally strong and charismatic, might offer protection, justice and unchanging stability: where humanity, cowed and admiring, might come to grant willingly to their night-walking ruler their tribute of blood, competing for the gift that would elevate them to his service. 

Better the dream than the reality: the features that could not be hidden, the darkened eyes, the predators’ teeth and nails; days passed skulking like a beast in a cave or a ruin; the fireside stories warning of travellers lost, of labourers too late to home, of the bodies found drained, or mauled in desperation and ravenous appetite. A mirror held to show an unsparing reflection: a thoughtless predator, a blight, to be trapped and rooted out.

\--

The sun was pouring through the window when Goodnight opened his eyes, lying on his bed again; across the room Lark was sitting and reading in a pool of light. At his movement she looked up and what he saw in her face told him he need not seek the words to explain. She lifted her chin. ‘Back in the web?’ 

He could not feel shame, no room in his heart for anything but the leaping joy that poured from him like light from a cracked shutter. As he pulled on his boots and stood up she scowled at him. ‘You gave him your blood? How long before you are dizzy and reeling once more?’

‘It will not be that way again,’ he said. To see her so hostile touched a spark of guilt at the memory: he could not blame her for her opposition. 

‘It will not,’ agreed Lark. And Goodnight thought he fathomed, then, how in the time Roche had travelled with them some part of the contagion had settled on her too, though she would not own it: the beating heart and the piercing teeth, the surrender that returned in dream, smoky and hot or delicate and chill. In the scablands she had walked the path beside them, one step and then another, further than she realised; how could he blame her that now she said, _Enough_? 

She closed her book. ‘You think to drag me down with you a second time?’

‘It will not come to that, I promise.’ Goodnight stood at the table, facing her across the jumble of papers and notebooks. ‘From here we will—‘ 

Lark cast the book down with a thud. ‘You cannot think to bring him with us. You took passage for two.’ 

Goodnight was already thinking, turning over the plan in his mind. ‘If we found some other way—‘ 

‘We?’ Lark sprang to her feet. ‘You may be willing to cast away your future for the sake of some hopeless dream, that you and he may live as equals: but mine you will not.’ 

‘He is in danger here,’ said Goodnight; he could see there was to be no melting of her hardness. 

‘Of course he is.’ Lark stopped her restless pacing and faced him with bleak humour. 'Am I the untried maid here? The only place where he can walk in safety is the place you have left behind.’ 

‘There are other ways,’ protested Goodnight, ‘it is simply a matter of—‘ 

‘There is no way,’ said Lark flatly, and the echo of Roche’s words was troubling. Her eyes were green stones. ‘I will hear no more from a vampir’s thrall.’ To his surprise the word no longer had power to wound. ‘Why will you not see what he is?’

‘He is a man,’ said Goodnight stubbornly. ‘He is Roche.’

‘Roche was a man from the Firewater Straits, but that man died. Now he is an animal, a thing, a _vampir_ —‘

Her voice had risen in her urgency; Goodnight already had his hand outstretched in warning when there came a sudden rap at the door. The word echoed in his ears: _how could it have gone unheard?_ Lark looked at him, then at another impatient knock went to open it. Carmine, a sack of grain over one shoulder, regarded them impassively. ‘Refit’s done.’ Goodnight could not read his expression beneath his tattoos. 

‘You’ll leave today?’ Lark asked him. 

Carmine nodded. ‘I’ll start loading at noon.’ He looked to Goodnight expectantly, and what he must do came to him then, all of a piece. 

His gesture took in the room: ‘We have a cabin still?’ Lark glanced at him, sharp and sideways, and Goodnight made himself smile as Carmine inclined his head. ‘Expect us in good time.’ 

‘Won’t wait,’ warned Carmine as he turned to leave. 

‘You may count on us,’ said Lark, and she held the door open to watch him go. She waited until his footfall died away, then turned to face Goodnight again. ‘Harder than you thought, to tell him _we do not require passage_?’ 

Goodnight chose his words with care. ‘We have danced this measure before and I did not heed you. Yet you saw it more clearly than I, I will own that.’ 

She eyed him shrewdly. ‘You'd leave him behind?’ He could see she disbelieved him.

‘No. I will not put you through it again; but we need not go together. He has found me, and we will find each other again. When you and I part ways--'

'If all is done, I will not sorrow,' she said, and made it easy for him.

He went to the chest and poured out water as though to wash. 'We will need provision.’ 

‘For a week, he said.’ Lark shrugged into her coat. Goodnight gestured at the money on the table; she gave him another long examining look, but took some coins and left. 

Goodnight sat down again on his bed. _It will not rebound on you_ , he had promised her. _No one need suffer_. But they had suffered, all three of them, and now must come a fresh betrayal. In truth this was no choice: this was where his steps had led since he passed beyond the city walls; perhaps even before that, from that first time he stood and called to Roche in the street. He did not like himself that he did it, but he was quick and thorough: when he paused in the doorway, leather satchel on his shoulder, all was in order as she would find it – the notebooks neatly squared on the table, the maps in their leather sleeves, the wallet of permits and introductions, of gems and gold. He had taken only what was his, satchel and flintlock and his militia coat, turned renegade to his master at last.

Stepping out of his life should not have been so easy: he ducked away between the wooden buildings, an actor quitting the stage, and threaded his way unnoticed away from the hustle of trade, through the workshops and storehouses scattered at the town’s edge. Beyond the last tumbledown sheds he waited in the shade of a tree to be sure he was not followed, then struck out, keeping to the shelter of the grasses’ margin, to a place where a long-wrecked aerostat lay half-concealed, its gondola smashed and listing, its windows starred to crystal, the leather balloon in blowing tatters beside it. 

Inside the broken cabin was hot and empty; Goodnight set down his bag and his coat with it and stood listening, but there was no sound save a lone fly droning against the glass. He picked his way across the tilting planks to where one undamaged door was closed fast against the light: he touched his hand to it, picturing Roche within, his pale skin ghostly in the dark, the ink blot of his hair. 

Goodnight lowered himself to sit, legs outstretched and his back to the wall, a patient guard. It was not as he had hoped, none of it. He had seen, in the faint dawn, how Roche’s garments, always so neat and citizenlike, had begun to wear and fray, how the dust of neglect had settled in his hair: it grieved him that he had brought him to this state, where there could be no pretence at status, where every step made them poorer than the last. _There is a way_ , he had promised, and he would not let that promise be vain. Plans half-formed played in his imagination – a wagon across the plains, if such could be found, Roche sleeping by day while Goodnight drove, sitting over the night’s fire together. Bands of freebooters roved the trails, to waylay the unwary; Roche need not even trouble to hunt. But at the end of the plain, what then? He sat in the airless space without counting the time, drifting with his thoughts, until his head fell to his shoulder, and he too slept.

\--

Later, he could not blame himself: had there not after all been an inevitability to it, this step, and then this, each closing off a branch until only one end remained? He jerked awake to the sun still trickling through the cracked panes, and at first he could not say what had roused him, or how long he had rested. But then another sound came, muffled, and a shadow passed before the window, and there could be no doubt of it: voices, outside, and the clink of iron. 

He struggled to his feet, stiff from the hard boards, took his flintlock from his bag and walked to the doorway, into the light. The crowd that surrounded the wreck, weapons clutched determinedly before them, was of market-traders, innkeepers, pilots, faces half-recognised, the forces of civilisation rallied against the monster in their midst. It was hopeless, so many and the sun still high, and in the knowledge of his own misjudgement Goodnight did not try to plead or dissemble: instead he lifted his head, blinking against the sun, and to watch the aerostat rising from its tower as the tether fell away.

He could imagine it, the gasbag full to straining, Carmine turning the dial to send steam hissing through the pipes, the passengers gathered at the rail, and among them Lark, craning in wonder as the ground lurched away below, the dark feather snatched from her hat and sent spinning slowly downwards. And in his mind’s eye he saw what she must see: the dark stain of the town beside the false sea of the grassland, and between, the flashes of sun on steel where the townsfolk surrounded their quarry.

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long gap while I wrestled with this, and thanks for sticking with it. One more chapter to come.
> 
> Speak to me: fontainebleau22.tumblr.com

**Author's Note:**

> Speak to me: fontainebleau22.tumblr.com


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